


Innamorarmi

by phoenike



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Assassins & Hitmen, Finland (Country), Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-05
Updated: 2015-04-25
Packaged: 2018-02-16 05:39:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2257875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenike/pseuds/phoenike
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Honestly, the last thing Leo needed to disturb his pleasant, work-filled existence was the distraction of a lover.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Modern assassin AU. Don't be too surprised if I change the super cheesy title. A big thanks to my betas Elenilote, Alessariel and EasternViolet, and Loki who has been helping me with my bad Italian from chapter 3 onward.
> 
> The story is located in Finland, and I couldn't really get away with using "da Vinci" as Leo's last name. I hope changing it doesn't annoy anybody too much. I'll try not to shove it in your faces more than necessary. I also had to give last names to Rosa and Paola, and tweak Paola's first name a bit. Ezio is still Italian, though :-)
> 
> [5/2017: As you can perhaps determine from when this was last updated, the fic is on indefinite hiatus. I've made attempts to continue writing it, and have the rest planned out... except for the smack middle, which is where this story currently lies. Unfortunately I cannot at this point promise that I will ever finish it.]

After four straight hours of wine and drinks, everyone was more than a little tipsy.

About thirty of the company’s employees still remained in the VIP lounge of the pretentious downtown Helsinki cocktail bar. Leo was pretty sure he’d seen less contentious war zones during his time with MSF, what with the drunk consultants in cheap suits trying to out-buzzword each other. Once again, he covered up his discomfort with smalltalk and a smile and nursed a couple of lousy drinks as long as humanly possible.

There were about a dozen things he would rather have been doing — most of which had something to do with the words ‘deadline’ and ‘overdue’ — but Rosa had insisted that he should come, and as usual, he’d been unable to say no to her. He wasn’t sure why. He’d suspected that she had something wicked on her mind, and sure enough, his instinct had been right.

“But he’s so cute!” Rosa wailed after she found him hiding near the toilets, making notes on his Jolla.

“Oh, very cute,” he agreed happily, still tapping on his phone. “Nice dimples. He also knows more about curling than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Aww, Leo.” Rosa made a sozzled effort at puppy eyes. “He’s just nervous about meeting you. He’s a sweet guy. Give him a chance? Please?”

Sweet and nervous? Not really Leo’s type, truth be told. He sighed and pocketed his phone.

“There’s nothing wrong with him. It’s me.” He bowed to look Rosa in the eye, smiling. “Please stop worrying about my personal life? I’m perfectly happy.”

She scowled. “The hell you are! It’s been over a year since you last went out with someone. It’s not natural for a guy your age to live like a fucking monk.”

“Rosa, dear, I appreciate your concern, but I simply do not have the time for a beau.”

From the look she gave him, he knew she was considering a scathing retort about his working hours. Another on whether sane 21st-century people used words like ‘beau’.

“Fine,” she said, instead. “Who am I to break a loving relationship between a man and his left hand? Come on, let’s go rescue Paula. I think I saw her getting cornered by those sharks again.”

Relieved to be spared of more guilt-tripping about his reclusive ways, Leo followed his friend back to the VIP lounge.

After furnishing themselves with fresh drinks, they headed to where Rosa’s CEO was perched on her heels with a long-suffering smile on her face, armored in her usual black Armani suit and red lipstick, surrounded by self-important looking members of the board. Leo waved to give her an excuse to extricate herself from the lot and pretended not to notice the wistful glances from the direction of a certain intoxicated curling enthusiast.

He had to give it to Rosa, the guy _was_ cute. But being single suited Leo just fine. More than fine, if productivity were to be used as a measure. What did a man need a love affair for, really? Romantic relationships took a lot of time, and Leo had so very much to do. And then there was the fact that forcing somebody — especially somebody one cared about — to always play the second (or third, or fourth) fiddle would have been patently unfair.

Honestly, the last thing Leo needed to disturb his pleasant, work-filled existence was the distraction of a lover.

He was just starting to wonder whether he could make a run for it without hurting anyone’s feelings, when a masculine purr from behind him nearly made him choke on his drink.

“ _Ciao, bella!”_

He turned, with the usual daft smile lingering on his face.

Bold Roman features. Dark brows and sultry eyes. Thick brown hair, just the right length for grabbing. Tanned skin, with a touch of shadow at the jaw. And curiously, an old scar across the mouth. Probably the result of slipping on soap in the bathroom, but Leo’s lizard brain didn’t care. To it, the scar made the guy look like a villain from an Alexandre Dumas adventure — the kind that Leo as a kid had always ended up falling for instead of the hero.

 _Definitely_ not from around.

Leo’s mind kept cataloguing helplessly. A gold crucifix at the throat. A fitted burgundy red dress shirt with an expensive sheen and what were decidedly too many open buttons, low enough to show some dark hair. Muscular shoulders and chest. Obviously a man who enjoyed spending time at the gym. Shorter than Leo by something like ten centimeters — but then, most guys were. In his home country, he would have been slightly above average height.

Native Italian. Closer to North than South. It was difficult to say from where exactly, based on a few vowels.

Despite its unnecessary thoroughness, Leo’s assessment only took a few seconds. None of it yielded an answer to the burning question _why._ Drop-dead gorgeous twenty-something Italians didn’t tend to fall out of the sky in his path. They just... didn’t.

He realized that he was staring and adjusted the glasses riding low on his nose. He could manage a basic conversation in Dante’s language, but considering the state of his wits, English felt safer —

Then it struck him.

 _Bella?_ A feminine. He was practically asleep, wasn’t he?

“Well, hello there, handsome!”

The Italian’s lazy grin widened at Paula’s barely accented English. Leo looked to where the reigning queen of Pellervoinen Consulting stood beside him, next to Leo’s former colleague and dear friend Miss Rosa Mäkinen, who was trying to keep from drooling on her snappy business casuals.

_Oh, crap._

At least Leo hadn’t had time to make an even bigger fool of himself. Then again, a guy who looked like that had to be used to stupid stares, whether they came from women or slightly overdressed, gay, bespectacled physician/linguist/artist/business analysts. With the smile still plastered on his face, Leo pretended to have been on top of the situation all along.

Not that it mattered. No one was paying him much attention. Not something he was used to, truth be told.

“I was afraid you couldn’t make it, Mr. Auditore,” Paula continued over the backdrop of conversation and faux-edgy fusion something-something. “Shame that you missed the party.”

“My meeting, it lasted longer than I expected. _Mi dispiace molto._ I assure you, I would have preferred your company to what I had to endure, _madonna._ ”

And how was it in any way fair that the delicious purr of a voice would speak English with such a sexy accent? Exaggerated, most likely... but who could blame the man? It sounded amazing. Also, Leo had to give the guy credit for flirting with Paula. At forty-nine, she was still breathtaking, but few of the local men had the balls to chat her up.

The three exchanged warm cheek kisses. Very South European. The way Rosa’s proverbial tongue continued to hang, Leo considered fetching her a napkin.

_Yeah, right. Take one for yourself while you’re at it, you pathetic oaf._

Suave as you please, the Italian leaned against one of the tall little tables with his arm behind Rosa’s back, so close that his sleeve brushed her jacket. Grossly intimate for any local, but Rosa didn’t seem to mind. Leo got the impression that the three already knew each other well from the office.

“ _Signorina_ Mekinen,” the Italian crooned to Rosa, butchering her last name to a great effect. “I saw your pitch. It was ruthless. I am in awe.” It actually sounded like genuine praise and not just a pick-up line. “Tell me. Did it hurt?”

Rosa blinked, still smiling, the vodka gimlet forgotten in her hand. “What? The pitch?”

“It must have been a long fall from the heaven, _bellissima._ ”

Leo refrained from rolling his eyes. At thirty, Rosa was the only female senior consultant at Pellervoinen — sharp, tough and more than able to put people out of the misconceptions they tended to harbor because of her delicate looks. She’d hardly fall for something as lame as _that._ Leo drank from his fresquita and waited for her riposte.

When she merely giggled, he almost snorted the drink back out through his nose.

“Mr. Auditore, really,” Paula chuckled. “Shameless as always. You must get into a lot of trouble, but I like it. Does everyone in the Florence office speak like that?”

 _Ah_. Leo should have realized earlier where the man was from. Despite being a Helsinki- based company, Pellervoinen Consulting was owned by Italians and had a branch in Florence. No one seemed to know what the dozen or so employees there did, exactly, but — it had to be the guy’s home address.

The Italian grinned. “Come and see? It will be my pleasure to show you around.”

Paula twirled the remains of her dry martini in her glass, a small smile on her lips. “I warn you, I’m going to hold you to that promise, young man.”

“ _Al vostro servizio, signora.”_ The man bowed, to the extent he could without giving the impression he was trying to steal a peek down Rosa’s blouse. Not that Rosa would necessarily have minded.

The thought of just melting away was starting to feel more tempting by the second, when Paula suddenly gestured toward Leo with her cocktail glass.

“Mr. Auditore, I must introduce you to our friend Mr. Valta. Or have you two met already?”

The Italian turned. Leo blinked.

Okay. Perhaps he couldn’t fault Rosa too much. Looking into those warm, light-brown eyes was practically a religious experience. In panic, Leo straightened and smiled even wider. _Goddammit, Leo._

“Your silent friend.” The Italian chuckled in a way that went straight to Leo’s shorts. “I do not believe I have had the pleasure.”

“He’s something of a celebrity around here,” Paula said. “Leo Valta? No, I don’t suppose people outside Finland would know. He used to do financial consulting for Pellervoinen, but he went freelance some time ago. Honestly, the company grew too small for him. But we still invite him to all the parties. He’s a good friend of Rosa’s.”

“We live together,” Rosa chirped in.

Leo had never seen a man create space so fast between himself and a beautiful woman.

“ _Chiedo scusa._ I’m sorry. I was not aware.”

Rosa’s smile widened. Well, it was nice to see that she hadn’t lost _all_ her wickedness. “Roommates. Perfectly platonic.”

“Oh. Oh!” The guy relaxed. Apparently he found nothing weird about the idea of two adult, well paid people of the opposing gender living together and not sharing a carnal relationship. He extended a hand to Leo.

“A pleasure, Mr. Valta. I am Ezio. Ezio Auditore. I’m here to oversee the merger.”

 _Aren’t you a bit young for upper management?_ Like a smiling robot, Leo took the offered hand. It was warm and dry and had the exact right amount of masculine strength to its grip. Blunt fingers... more calloused than one would expect from a desk jockey. From sports? Rings? _Wrong hand, idiot._ Leo was definitely not at the top of his form. Perhaps it was the downy hair he could feel against his fingertips at the back of Mr. Auditore’s hand. Or the scent of very expensive cologne.

Suddenly it felt like a very, very long time since he’d last had sex.

And then the facts clicked in place in his head, minutes later than they should have.

The majority shareholder of Pellervoinen Consulting was a Florence-based holding company called Credito Internazionale _._ It was owned by an old, local family that went by the name Auditore. _Ezio Auditore._ Shouldn’t have taken a genius to work it out. Project manager, eh? More like playboy heir. It explained the bespoke clothes and Panerai watch and... Leo forbade his eyes from wandering any lower, to check the belt and shoes that had to be just as staggeringly expensive.

Mr. Auditore harbored no such compunctions. Leo had been to Italy often enough to know the culture of shameless once-overs, but the way the man ran his gaze all over him still made him blush. He was glad that the bar wasn’t too brightly lit. Perhaps the guy wouldn’t notice.

To his horror, Leo realized that he’d been silently holding Mr. Auditore’s hand for what seemed like an eternity. “Likewise,” he managed to croak. He release his grip, not sure whether what he’d said made any sense at all.

The Italian leaned against the table again, now practically snuggling Rosa under his arm. “Finns. Nice people, but _so_ shy.”

 _There’s a difference between shy and reserved,_ Leo’s brain objected. But his face simply clung to its defensive smile like something that could keep him from drowning. Mr. Auditore’s touch still lingered on his skin.

And just like that, the guy’s attention was on Rosa again.

“Except you, _Signorina_ Mekinen. Are you sure you’re not part _italiano?_ ”

Rosa fluffed her dark pixie curls. “Oh hell, all I know about Italy are Berlusconi, Bertolucci and Eros Ramazzotti —”

“Ramazzotti!” Mr. Auditore faked astonishment. Then, out of nowhere, he sang the first notes of _Più bella cosa_ in what was a surprisingly fine tenor.

The women gasped and exclaimed. Even Leo was impressed.

From there, everything went more and more downhill. There was talk about the house band, joining which for the duration of his stay Mr. Auditore absolutely refused to consider unless Rosa would agree to sing a duet with him. She told him that she didn’t possess enough talent to work her way through _Ukko Nooa._ He offered to give her private lessons.

Leo knew he had to get away. The flirting was making him sick. He mumbled an apology and escaped to the men’s room where, safely inside a stall, he started cursing under his breath, every word emphasized with a bump of his head against the trendy birchwood door.

 _You’re_ not _crushing on a straight guy again, Leo. Especially not some sleazy Italian gigolo._ Especially _not some sleazy Italian gigolo Rosa has set her eyes on._

Not that Rosa had anything to fear from him. If that Florentine macho had even an ounce of homo in him, Leo was willing to eat his favorite pair of Jimmy Choos. He didn’t begrudge Rosa for her luck with bed fodder — but sometimes it frustrated him that they shared such a similar taste in men. To put it short, the kind that went for feminine women like her, not bearded 192 centimeter blokes in violet patchwork blazers and orange statement glasses.

Better to bow out before he embarrassed himself completely. Leo handled his business and went back to the lounge.

By now, Paula was nowhere to be seen, and the Italian had parked himself in Leo’s spot. From the direction Leo approached, he had an excellent view at the guy’s backside, wrapped in slacks tailored within a millimeter of their existence. The man’s physique was flawless like a Ferrari — not just the result of weights and cardio, but generations of upper-class Mediterranean breeding. No Finn could have pulled off such clothes without looking like a puff. But Mr. Auditore oozed effortless hetero confidence. Rosa was not the only woman (or man) in the bar who couldn’t take her eyes off of him.

When Leo got to the table, he saw that his glass had already been taken away — probably along with the memory of his existence. Rosa smiled at him. But he knew without saying that he’d become the third wheel.

“Sorry. Korean food...” Great. Now he was making them think that he had sexy, sexy diarrhea. “You mind if I bog off? It was nice meeting you, Mr. Auditore.” He nodded at the Italian, trying to appear at least fairly sane.

The man nodded back, slightly curious, looking like some damned Renaissance prince with his ridiculous scarred lip and air of easy superiority. “The pleasure was all mine, Mr. Valta.”

“You alright, love?” Rosa asked, perhaps because Leo nearly swooned.

“Tired, that’s all.” Leo gave her a peck on the cheek. “See you later.”

At least they had the grace not to look the least bit sorry when he left.

Past boasting MBA’s in their suits, beanie-wearing designers, smartphone-hugging software architects, the coat check and the porter, Leo was almost surprised to find that the sun was just setting. At nine o’clock, Friday night in Helsinki had barely started. He didn’t feel like waiting for a tram full of university students on their way to chug cheap beer in practice for the First of May, so he popped his collar against the spring chill, tucked his hands in his pockets and made it on foot down Mannerheimintie to Erottaja and from there toward Ullanlinna and home.

Half an hour and one photograph request later, he let himself into the dark loft. He was completely sober and lacked excuses to piss away what remained of the evening. He went into the kitchen, rolled up his sleeves, opened his laptop and started working.

He managed to resist the temptation to google ‘Ezio Auditore’ until eleven.

Most of the hits were photos of the guy on French or Italian jet-set gossip sites, usually with some beautiful model on his arm, knocking elbows with famous actors or sports heroes — always smiling, always handsome and dressed to the nines. Oh, to be twenty-five again, and the scion of a filthy rich family that could trace its ancestry back to the fifteenth century.

Then Leo chanced on a news story dated eight years ago.

A well-known Florentine banker had taken a new Alfa Romeo for a spin near the French Riviera, bringing along three sons. An unexplained malfunction had sent the car plunging down a mountain side. Only seventeen-year-old Ezio Giacomo Auditore had survived, with severe internal injuries and a shard of glass through his face. Uncle Mario Auditore had been left in charge of the family business.

About Ezio’s mother and sister, the whole internet offered a single photograph taken by paparazzi after the funeral. Both were slim and Catholic stark in full mourning, dark veils covering their faces. The details of their lives were lost in the utter silence only the richest and most privileged of mortals could afford.

o o o

A couple hours into sleep, Leo awoke to the sound of the front door being opened and closed.

He reached for his phone. _01:03_. Rather early for Rosa to come back after a wet night out? Leo rolled over in his bed and started dozing off again.

Two pairs of footsteps and the low murmur of a masculine voice made him realize that more than one person had entered the loft.

The house was over a century old and built of solid stone. The elderly gentleman who lived right below them played sax for hours every day, and had they not been friends, Leo would not have known. But inside, things were different. He and Rosa had their own bedrooms, separate from the open main space, but their walls were not nearly soundproof.

He heard keys being tossed on a table. Then high-heeled shoes hitting a wall. Rosa’s smothered, drunken laughter. Very unsuccessful tiptoeing across the living-room space, followed by something human-sized landing on a sofa.

Silence fell again, except for the occasional creak of furniture.

Leo started drifting back to sleep. But before he could, he was jarred back awake by what was definitely a woman’s moan.

Five minutes into it, Rosa was starting to babble.

“Oh God. Yes. Yes! Right there. _Voi hyvä luoja...”_

Groaning, Leo reached for a pair of ear plugs from the nightstand.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Leo’s Saturday morning started at nine thirty to a lovely tenor singing in Italian somewhere beyond his bedroom door, about love and kissing at dawn and every sunset.

After five hours of less than restful slumber, Leo mostly just wanted to lose consciousness again. But he had to admit that things could have been worse. The guy actually knew what he was doing. More curious than his musical talent, however, was the simple fact that he was still there. Rosa’s nightly guests had a tendency to be long gone by the time Leo got up, whether they had wanted to leave or not.

After a few minutes, Leo gave up trying to go back to sleep. He fumbled for his home glasses. Forgoing the old clothes discarded on furniture and exercise equipment — perfect for cocooning in when working, but maybe not for facing what now waited behind his door — he rummaged through his closet for a more presentable pair of sweatpants and shirt and left his room, telling himself that it was just nature’s call that dragged him out, not any sort of masochistic curiosity.

“Good morning,” he muttered as he hurried barefoot past the smell of fresh coffee coming from the kitchen. He didn’t look. He simply lacked the courage. If he made no effort to suppress his memory, he could still hear Rosa’s incoherent moans in his head. Thankfully the guy himself hadn’t been a screamer. Leo wasn’t sure how he could have survived _t_ _hat_.

“ _Ah!_ _Buongiorno_ _!_ ” he heard the man call after him before he pulled the bathroom door closed between himself and the danger of ridiculously upbeat Italians.

The bathroom was moist and warm. Someone had just taken a long, hot shower. Leo tried hard not to think of Mr. Ezio Giacomo Auditore, all of twenty-five, standing stark naked under running water not two meters from where he was taking a morning leak. Even more importantly, he tried not to think of what had happened in the place at about three in the morning. The shower sex had to have been the guy’s third time during the night.

Five minutes of unnecessary grooming later, Leo knew he had to get out. He shuffled his way back to the kitchen.

Past the corner, he blinked and tried not to hyperventilate. With his back to him, Mr. Auditore was standing at the kitchen counter, wearing one of Rosa’s towels wrapped around his loins... and nothing else.

Leo staggered across the hardwood floor to the countertop that split the kitchen area in two. Somehow he succeeded in getting there and planting himself on a barstool while the cause of his agitation continued to hum sappy love songs and roll up pieces of defrosted puff pastry on a baking sheet.

The kind of physical perfection the guy boasted could not be achieved just by going to the gym a few times a week. It took dedication. A kung-fu monk level of dedication. In a panic, Leo tried to do what he always did in distress — dismantle its source into its parts. The Italian had quite a few interesting scars for a man with a white-collar job. Some could probably be traced back to the tragic car accident that had claimed the lives of his father and brothers, but others looked too recent. Slightly overgrown, brown hair curled around his ears and nape, still damp from the shower. The narrow golden chain that held his crucifix still hung around his neck.

But analyzing detail didn’t help. The mysterious scars and hint of Catholic guilt only made the man more attractive.

“How are you, Mr. Valta?” Mr. Auditore cast a ten-thousand euro smile over his brawny shoulder. Leo wanted to roll around in his day-old growth of stubble like a dog. “I hope it is fine that I use the kitchen? Rosa told me to make myself at home.”

 _She did?_ Leo stammered something affirmative in reply. His brain had turned into mashed potato. In despair, he flipped open his laptop and pretended to start reading the morning newspaper. Better to appear pathologically introverted than make a complete fool out of himself.

After a moment, a bowl of fragrant milk coffee appeared in his field of vision. He looked up. The croissants were ready for the oven, and Mr. Auditore had come to stand at the counter across from him, wiping his floured hands in a kitchen towel.

“ _Café au lait_. You drink coffee, _sì?_ ”

 _God, yes. Coffee. Glass cleaner. Arsenic. Anything you want._ Leo’s mouth opened and a strangled ‘yes, thank you’ came out.

Like a malfunctioning Rube Goldberg machine, his brain grasped at possible explanations for anyone to be in such a peak of human condition. Solo free climbing? Competitive MMA? Absolutely masochistic amounts of crossfit? Whatever it was, it had to involve plyometrics and masses of adrenaline. The fuzz on the Italian’s body was perfect, too — well groomed and thoroughly masculine, just like everything else in him. To top off the addling experience, he smelled of Leo’s own shampoo and deodorant.

Leo’s brain was starting to short circuit. Thank god for the table between them. Just watching the guy was giving him a hard-on. It took several seconds to realize that the man had said something.

“Beg pardon?” Leo choked out, smiling like his life depended on it.

Mr. Auditore sighed. “ _Scus_ _atemi_ _._ My English, I know it is _terribile_. Sugar, Mr. Valta?” he said very carefully, trying to overcome his devastating natural pronunciation.

“No, thanks,” Leo wheezed.

“ _Va bene!”_ Mr. Auditore grinned and went back to the stove, moving like a goddamn Chippendales dancer.

Leo considered ending his suffering by opening a window and jumping out. Unfortunately, with his luck, the five-story fall to Tehtaankatu would probably just have left him horribly maimed.

Oblivious to his gay purgatory, Mr. Auditore started breaking eggs in a bowl and whisking in milk, salt and pepper. Leo sipped from his coffee. It tasted like heaven. Someone knew how to use an espresso machine and a steamer.

“So, what do you do, Mr. Valta?” the Italian asked. “Financial consulting, yes?”

Did the guy expect him to _speak?_

“I, uh — err — yes, I analyze monetization models for games.”

“Ah! Football or _formula uno?_ ” Mr. Auditore poured the egg mixture into a sizzling hot pan with one hand and threw some bread in a toaster with the other.

In his compromised intellectual state, Leo couldn’t even tell if the guy was joking. “Online,” he said.

“Oh... you mean the internet or — no, wait. Facebook, eh?” The man clucked his tongue. “My sister, she made me a page, but I forget the password. I should ask my secretary to call the owner, what’s his name... Zucchini... Zucchero... agh, I cannot remember.”

Now Leo was almost certain that the guy had to be joking. Almost. “Yes, games on the internet. Like Candy Crush Saga, or Farmville, or World of Warcraft...”

“You mean someone pays money to crush imaginary candy?”

 _You’d be surprised._ “I guess so. My job’s basically about maximizing profit without compromising user retention. It’s all about free-to-play and freemiums, right now — I mean, buying or earning in-game content. That kind of cash flow is difficult to predict. And it’s hard to fix a boat you’re already sailing, even if you find the right numbers to follow. So, I analyze data and figure out the most cost-effective ways to generate revenue and —” _drone on and on about topics that interest guys like him about as much as a used_ _rubber_ _._

A company like Credito Internazionale invested in several different lines of business. If Mr. Auditore really had something of an actual job, he could most closely be described as a banker. Aside from which, Leo knew that he was rambling. He adjusted his glasses and shrugged.

“That sort of thing,” he mumbled.

“Sounds impressive,” the Italian said, speaking so politely that it was obvious he had no clue what Leo was blathering about, and continued to stir the eggs in the pan with a wooden fork.

Perhaps on account of the delicious smells starting to spread from the kitchen, Rosa’s bedroom door finally opened. A moment later, Leo heard the bathroom door close in turn.

Mr. Auditore turned to point at him with his scrambling implement. “Ha! I remember now. _Signora_ Paola said you’re famous. What did you do?”

“Ah. Doesn’t take much in such a small country. I wrote a book, did a few TV shows...” _And other stuff. But let’s not go there._

“And it must also be the looks, yes?”

Leo blinked. “What?” Jesus, his eloquence was downright phenomenal.

“Well, you’re tall, handsome...”

_Is he flirting with me?!_

Leo let his eyes flicker sideways. “The toaster’s faulty,” he said. “Sometimes it —”

Before he could finish, the spring released the tray and two pieces of toast flew out of the machine like in a cartoon. Without turning, Mr. Auditore reached his left hand and caught them in mid-air.

“Um. Shoots out the bread,” Leo finished.

The Italian went still. For a second his expression seemed almost alarmed. Then he dropped the toasts on a plate and gave Leo what could only be called a dazzling grin.

“You’re a good looking man, Mr. Valta. A lot of Finnish women like, _sì?_ ”

Several things went through Leo’s mind.

 _Err, what. Women?_ Even if his body language and clothes and slack-jawed staring the night before hadn’t been a tell, Leo was pretty sure that the _Some Like It Hot_ movie poster was still hanging in its frame behind him on the wall. However, candor about his sexual preferences paled in importance compared to the ninja trick the guy had just performed. _No one_ had reflexes like that.

And thirdly: _of course he’s not flirting with you, you dumb Finn. He just isn’t as pathologically inhibited as you are._

Indeed, Mr. Auditore continued to chatter cheerfully about what had to be the true objects of his interest. “You must come to Firenze, _signore_ Valta! The women, they will go _pazzo_ when they see you. We should go to my uncle’s casino, play with real money instead of candy. Just give a call to my secretary, I will arrange everything. We can party all night long, invite _le belle ragazze_ from Elite Milano...”

“Sounds fun,” Leo croaked, although the opposite was closer to the truth. “Listen, it feels weird to be addressed by my last name. No one does that here. Just call me Leo.”

Mr. Auditore beamed like he’d just been told that he’d won the lottery. “ _Con piacere, Leonardo!_ And you must call me Ezio.” He removed the pan from the gas.

 _Leonardo_ _..?_ Leo was starting to feel like he was in Oz. The one that boasted talking lions and ruby slippers, and an unfortunate lack of steamy gay sex in the showers.

More toast went in the toaster. Orange juice, butter, jam and cheese came out of the fridge. The croissants appeared from the oven. The towel was riding low on Mr. Auditore’s hips. He twisted it back in place just before it fell. Blood refused to return to Leo’s brain from where it had gathered instead.

Piles of food started to appear in front of him. A mountain of toast and croissants, a whole carton’s worth of scrambled eggs, yogurt, condiments, orange juice and more coffee. Leo had thought that an Italian breakfast consisted of latte and _pain au chocolat._ Also, had anyone told him that his kitchen contained the ingredients for all of this, he would have laughed.

“ _Buon appetito, Leonardo!”_ Mr. Auditore said, planted himself at the table and dug in.

Not sure what else to do, Leo followed suit.

For a moment they just munched away in silence. The Italian downed a massive amount of food. Leo couldn’t imagine where it all went. There was no excess fat on him whatsoever, just hard muscle under bronzed skin.

In the middle of Leo’s gay via dolorosa, Rosa dragged herself out of the bathroom, dressed in a bathrobe and a towel around her head.

“Hi guys,” she moaned. Leo could tell that she had a hangover.

“ _Ciao bellissima_ _! Come stai?”_ Mr. Auditore got up and practically swept Rosa off her feet. Leo tapped at his computer and pretended not to care about the sounds of smooching behind his back. Why didn’t anyone ever sweep _him_ off his feet like that?

Oh, yeah. Not a lot of sweeping happened when you towered over everybody. The sad story of his life.

“You made this?” Rosa asked in disbelief as she sat at the table. “Out of what was in _our_ fridge?”

Mr. Auditore (Leo still failed miserably to think of him as _Ezio)_ insisted on fetching her the necessary implements before settling back on his stool. “I live alone,” he said. “I’m a big boy, I need more than a cappuccino in the morning.”

Leo’s mind called bullshit. The man was a playboy millionaire. He cooked because he had the time and wanted to impress his girlfriends, not because he needed to. And scrambled eggs and croissants from ready-made dough were hardly high cuisine. But it was difficult to feel sarcastic toward someone who possessed such a disarming grin. Besides, for such simple fare the food was actually pretty good — the eggs were moist and well seasoned, and the croissants were baked to perfection.

“Can I keep you?” Rosa asked.

The Italian laughed, rich and husky. It was the way people laughed with someone they’d had very good sex with. “ _Ma certo, bella_ _._ I come live in your closet, _sì?_ Nice change from, er, boardrooms.”

Rosa cradled a bowl of _café au lait_ between her manicured fingers. Her eyes roamed over him in knowing appreciation. “Mmm. But I can only take you out to play on weekends. Otherwise, I’ll never get any work done.”

He waggled his eyebrows and bit into a piece of crunchy toast with his perfect teeth.

Leo was losing his appetite. The post-coital banter was making him feel alone and miserable. Also, he still had that semi in his boxers. Could he have been any more pathetic?

“So, what’s the story behind the scars?” Rosa asked. “There has to be a story.”

“Ah. Yes. Lots of skiing accidents. I should not be allowed near those things.”

Rosa snorted and looked at Leo. “Professional opinion from the doctor in the house?”

Now the hazel eyes turned toward him, curious again. “You’re a doctor, Leonardo? A doctor of medicine?”

Leo laughed, embarrassed. “Well, technically I’m just a licentiate.”

“Have you practiced?”

“Sort of.” Leo felt a hole starting to gape beneath him. “I was with _Médecins sans frontières_ for a couple of years.”

Mr. Auditore shook his head slowly. Leo was pretty certain the man had just decided that he was more than a little crazy. To his relief, none of the usual unwelcome questions followed, however.

“So, what _is_ your professional opinion, _dottore_ Leonardo?” Mr. Auditore asked, instead.

It took Leo a moment to realize what he was talking about. He blinked and looked.

Aside from the face, a long, faded scar ran down the man’s forearm. A ragged, angry blemish stood near his collarbone, dangerously close to major arteries, made uglier by the invasive surgery required to patch things up. And those were just the ones Leo could see. Some of the scars could have been left by the car accident, but surely not all of them? Somehow they did not strike Leo as accidental. He’d seen marks made by weapons and these had the same feel to him, although they had clearly been treated far better than your average field wound. But since they naturally couldn’t have been made by weapons... what were they?

Maybe young Mr. Auditore just had a very, very kinky sexlife?

No. Based on what Leo could remember hearing the night before, he was a good old classics type of guy. Very good old classics. Yes, sir.

_Goddammit, Leo..._

“Could be anything. Some people scar more easily.” _Not like this, though._ “Who knows. All _I_ know is that getting them had to hurt.”

The Italian watched him for a second without much of an expression. Then he grinned. “There you go, _mia bella_. Many painful skiing accidents.”

“Right.” Rosa waved a fork above her plate of scrambled eggs. “This is really good, by the way.”

“ _Grazie!”_ Mr. Auditore looked ridiculously pleased by the praise. “Is it now my turn to make a question?”

Rosa chuckled. “Fire away.”

“How come you two live together?”

Leo wasn’t sure how, but somehow he got through _that_ discussion without saying the word ‘gay’ once.

Not that he usually needed much outing. But Mr. Auditore came from a culture where even the straightest of straight men wore pink and kissed each other on the cheek. And if he couldn’t understand the cultural references scattered around the apartment... why should Leo have made an issue out of something that wasn’t?

To put it short, they had met at the university at a time when Rosa was trying to get rid of someone who couldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. She’d moved into Leo’s guestroom for safety, and the arrangement had worked so well that, after a few months, they’d decided to make it permanent.

The Italian didn’t seem to find their cohabitation strange at all. Leo wondered why. Even the Finnish system sometimes had a hard time acknowledging that two people of opposite sex could live together without being romantically involved, and for what Leo knew, Mr. Auditore’s background could hardly be more liberal.

After ten minutes, the man looked at the clock on the wall.

“ _Mannaggia_ _,”_ he muttered. “Please excuse me. I have an appointment.” Pushing back from the table, he circled it to give Rosa a kiss. She rewarded him with a genuinely delighted smile. In her books, a guy who was willing to leave without a court order was an okay guy indeed.

Wistfully, Leo watched the Italian make his sexy way to Rosa’s room. When he came out of his trance, he realized that Rosa was watching him. He felt himself go crimson.

“Aren’t you afraid of STD’s?” he muttered in Finnish.

Rosa’s eyes glinted. “‘I’m perfectly happy’. Yeah, right. Don’t you think I can see how you look at him?”

“So?” Useless to pretend she wasn’t right.

“I guess I can’t blame you.” She picked at the yogurt container in her hand. “They don’t come much hotter than that. But you’re out of luck. He’s totally straight.”

“As if I don’t know,” Leo muttered. “After last night, I know exactly how straight.”

Rosa blinked. “Um. So you heard? All of it? Even the —”

When Leo just looked at her, it was her turn to blush. “Oh god. I was drunk, and the guy’s a horrible fucking flirt. It’s been like three weeks of foreplay with him parading in Zegna suits around the office and... shit, you probably don’t want to hear how fucking mind-blowing it was?”

“I think I already did.”

Rosa dropped her forehead against the table. “Would it make you feel better if I let you kill me?”

It wasn’t nearly the first time either of them had brought night-time visitors over. They had a system of text messaging each other in warning. When the rare ex tempore hook-up happened, they resorted to ear plugs and humor. However, Leo wasn’t above making her squirm a little.

“No. Continue to suffer, for all I care. But next time, give me three hours of warning so I can take a shuttle to Tallinn, okay? I think that’s far enough not to hear your screams.”

“Nooo...” Rosa wailed.

The sound of footsteps made them both sit up and turn, smiling like morons.

The Italian sauntered out of Rosa’s bedroom, dressed in his bespoke suit and burgundy red shirt, attaching his watch as he walked, a phone held between his ear and shoulder. With apparently no effort at all, he looked like something out of a commercial.

“ _Buon giorno, bella mia!_ ” he said into the phone. “Can I get a _taxi,_ _per favore?_ The address is...” He stopped and blinked, and looked at Rosa.

She told him. He flashed a smile and concluded the call, after saying the street name four times before being understood.

“Guess I’ll see you at the office, then?” Rosa asked. Leo applauded her nonchalance while wearing a bathrobe.

“ _Sì, bellissima_ _,”_ he said and walked toward the front door. “Please, do not get up for my sake, friends. I’m in a hurry. I apologize. I should have noticed the time. I’m expected elsewhere.”

Expected where, exactly? On Saturday, before eleven in the morning? When Mr. Auditore turned away, the grin died from his face. For a second, he looked like a completely different person. Leo fidgeted with his empty coffee mug.

After stepping into his Ferragamos and shrugging on a sleek, black cashmere Chesterfield coat, the Italian turned to look at them one last time, gloves in hand. Just like that, the grim look was gone, replaced by that ten-thousand euro smile that lit up his face.

“ _A_ _presto_ _, amici_ _._ _Arrivederci!”_

“And there he goes.” Rosa sighed upon the door being closed. She started tapping on her iPhone, probably texting some friend or another about what had happened.

Leo felt a strange touch of melancholy.

Something exciting had brushed his life in passing, and now it was gone. Despite the Italian’s hopeful words about a night out in Florence, Leo would have wagered his favorite aunt that they’d never meet again. Mr. Auditore would ride into an Italian Alp sunset with his Maserati and supermodel girlfriend, and Leo would continue to analyze game revenue tactics and grow older and more lonely in cold, distant Helsinki.

o o o

Two weeks passed.

o o o

One evening, Leo was jarred from his working flow by the sound of keys being turned in the lock. It was Rosa, of course, getting home after either doing serious overtime or having a dinner and a couple of drinks with someone, or both.

“Did you hear the news?” she asked breathlessly as she kicked away her shoes and hung up her trench.

Leo glanced at the time. It was already past ten. He lowered his feet from the ottoman and put his laptop on a side table next to a stash of empty coffee mugs.

“No?” he wagered. He knew his procrastinating ways too well to let himself follow the news while he was working.

Rosa shook her head and huffed her way into the living room area, where she reached for a remote and turned on the TV. A female anchor’s voice filled the loft as she cranked up the volume.

“... as Italian businessman Francesco de’ Pazzi was left critically wounded by an unidentified gunman at the Helsinki-Vantaa airport this morning. No civilians were injured in the incident. Francesco de’ Pazzi is involved in several lawsuits involving alleged corruption, embezzlement and tax evasion. The perpetrator remains on the loose and is assumed armed and extremely dangerous.”

A male news anchor continued.

“At half past three in the afternoon, a violent altercation took place at the Kamppi shopping center in downtown Helsinki. An man was shot several times, yet survived to incapacitate his three attackers and two security guards and escape. Two bystanders were injured in the shooting. Connections to earlier Helsinki-Vantaa incident and international organized crime are suspected. The Helsinki Police Department has launched a search operation for the unidentified male suspect. He is approximately 180 centimeters tall and athletic, dressed in black track pants, hooded black shirt, black gloves and white sneakers. He is likely to have sustained severe injuries. Citizens are requested to report all sightings in the emergency number.”

“The Minister of the Interior, Päivi Räsänen, was reached to comment on the situation —”

Leo waved at Rosa. She muted the TV, sparing them from whatever words of wisdom the leader of their Christian Democrat Party had to share.

“It’s like a fucking spy movie!” Rosa exclaimed.

The assassination of an Italian mafioso in Helsinki metropolitan area in broad daylight? Well, you could say that.Leo took off his glasses and rubbed his face. He’d been working on a big MMO project for the whole day and hadn’t even changed out of his pajamas.

“I guess I know now what the afternoon papers are going to shriek about for the next two weeks.”

“Leo!” Rosa fell to lie on the couch, hidden behind its back. “The weirdest thing to happen for the whole year in this place, and you just think it’s annoying that the yellow press is going to go mad? Fuck you. You don’t even _read_ the yellow papers.”

“Well, I’m not a social porn junkie, like some people.”

Rosa flipped him a bird from behind the back of the couch.

Leo sighed and stretched, then winced as his stomach rumbled loudly. Rosa pushed higher to peer at him.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t eaten anything again?”

“Well...”

Rosa groaned and went to get her phone from her bag. “I can’t understand how you kept yourself alive before me. I’m ordering pizza. What are you having?”

“Are you sure the pizza delivery men dare to come out with a dangerous gunman running loose in the city?”

Rosa flipped him another bird and continued to dial.

An hour later, Leo had sated his hunger with a margherita and Rosa was nibbling on the remains of a quattro stagioni. She was just leafing through the latest Donald Duck comic when her phone started vibrating on the living room table. With a slice of pizza hanging from her mouth, she went over and grabbed it.

“Unknown caller,” she muttered. “Fuck you, unknown caller.” She refused the call, returned to the kitchen and, tossing the phone on the table, continued to eat.

A moment later, the phone started buzzing again.

Rosa picked it up and frowned. Leo knew why. Her private number had been kept secret for years for very good reasons.

“The same fucking unknown caller. Fuck. If it’s Joni, I’ll have to change numbers again.” She tapped on the phone and pressed it to her ear. _“Niin?”_ she said tartly.

Almost at once, Leo saw her expression change.

For a moment she just listened. When she replied, she’d switched to English.

“Yeah, of course. We’re here. I need to ask Leo, though. Wait a sec?” She looked at him and covered the phone’s microphone with her hand. “It’s Ezio. Can he come over?”

 _Mom, can my Italian fuckbuddy_ _come_ _play with me?_ Leo looked at the clock. Past eleven on a Thursday night. An interesting time to pay a surprise visit.

From what Rosa had mentioned, Leo knew that her flirting with the Italian had continued, but he doubted that their tryst had been repeated. Rosa rarely hooked up with the same guy more than once. There might have been a diagnosis or two lurking in there, somewhere, but Leo was not a shrink.

“Is he drunk?” he asked. Couldn’t think of any other reason to suddenly hear from the man.

“Not sure,” Rosa said. “Maybe?”

Leo glanced at himself.

So, the sex god was coming for a repeat visit, and what was he wearing? His most comfortable old set of home clothes — which amounted to rumpled pajama pants, an old _Porin Jazz_ t-shirt, felt slippers and a bathrobe.

“Yeah. Sure. I was hoping for that three hours of advance warning though,” he muttered. But Rosa was already speaking in her phone again.

“Sure, just come on over! How far are you?” Her eyes widened. She got up from her chair, gesturing for Leo to do the same. “Downstairs? Uhh, sure, press the button and... yeah! See ya.”

She cut the call. They stared at each other. Almost immediately, the doorbell buzzed.

“Crap,” Leo muttered. Now he knew that the Italian was going to be really, really drunk. “Can you get that? I’m going to... change. Or something.”

“Sure. Do we have wine or... shit.” Rosa hurried in the direction of the door. “What the fuck is he doing here? He hasn’t showed up at the office for three days!”

“How should I know?” Leo was already walking toward his room.

“Hey! Come on up, the door’s open!” Rosa said in the intercom just as Leo reached the door.

He started frantically searching for something to wear. The spiffy new three-piece suit that made him look like a movie star? _Idiot._ Something he might wear at home. His brain was failing him completely. He pulled out a pair of jeans and a Prada sweater. As if it mattered what he wore. Putting on his best clothes wouldn’t make the man any more likely to give him a second look.

Before he got more than his slippers off, he heard the front door open. Someone shuffled in. Leo waited for the flood of exuberant, drunk Italian — but it didn’t happen. Instead, something fell against the door, closing it. Suddenly he knew that something was very wrong.

When Rosa screamed his name, he was already running back.

For a demented moment of non-sequitur he expected to see Rosa’s crazy ex-boyfriend there with a knife in his hand. The scar he’d received that night still sometimes itched. But of course it wasn’t Rosa’s ex. It was _him_. Leaning heavily against the door, a hood pulled deep over his head, an arm around himself as if protecting something fragile.

No sign of the millionaire playboy, now. Still, Leo would have recognized the man anywhere. His climber’s shoulders, his long pornstar legs. Rosa was standing back, shocked to inaction.

Like someone caught in a dream, Leo walked across his home toward danger.

_...a man was shot several times, yet survived to incapacitate his three attackers and two security guards and escape..._

White sneakers. But no gloves. Instead of track pants, the guy was wearing a pair of ill-fitting jeans, and his hooded jacket was white with red patterns, not black. _Doesn’t mean_ _anything_ _. He’s had time to change._

At Leo’s footsteps, he raised his head. In the light of the nearby table lamp, his eyes gleamed with something more than just pain. Leo knew that he was looking at 180 centimeters and 85 kilos of pure, unadulterated menace. Words like _international_ _organized_ _crime_ and _armed and extremely dangerous_ echoed like gunshots or artillery in the back of his mind, shrieking for him to run for his phone and call 112.

But when the man spoke, his voice sounded young and afraid.

“Leonardo. Please help me. I don’t want to die.”

Leo caught him before he collapsed to the floor.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize in advance for all the inevitable errors in this chapter. I wanted the medical details to be at least a tiny bit realistic, so I did a lot of research, but there are undoubtedly things I overlooked or just plain got wrong. Others I left out to avoid infodump. If anyone with actual working knowledge feels the need to tell me where I went wrong, go ahead. I won't mind :-)
> 
> That being said, thanks to my betas once again. You guys rock. I especially want to thank Alessariel for listening to my gushing, and Loki for proofing my bad Italian and telling me about Italian culture.
> 
> There are a couple of small warnings for this chapter -- check the end notes if you feel the need.

Leo guided the Italian’s limp weight down and knelt over it. He could tell the man was breathing, and not bleeding all over the hardwood floor, but there were at least a dozen other things that could be slowly killing him, and blacking out wasn’t exactly a great start.

In a few seconds, the man’s long lashes fluttered and his eyes opened. He blinked, clearly confused by the sudden change of his orientation. Under the hood, whorls of hair were sticking to his forehead with sweat. His olive complexion made his bloodless skin look ashen rather than sallow in the dim light of the nearby table lamp.

“Rosa, call the police and an ambulance,” Leo said.

He’d spoken Finnish, but the Italian recognized the words. His eyes focused, and with what was surprising strength for a fainting man, he grabbed Leo’s arm, half lifting off the floor by sheer intensity of emotion.

“No!” he growled. “I will be dead in twenty-four hours!”

“You will be dead of sepsis or blood loss if you don't get proper treatment!”

“Better that than — _Madonna..!”_ The man grimaced and sank back. He was clearly in a lot of pain, and there had to be a reason, one that would require x-rays, CT scans, lab tests, surgery — none of which Leo was able to provide.

How many hours was it since the shooting at the mall? A ballistic vest had to have been involved. But body armor had its limitations. Even if it managed to stop a bullet, the kinetic energy went somewhere — usually into the flesh and bone beneath.

Rosa returned with the phone.

“Don’t,” the man pleaded, more desperate than belligerent, now. _“Ti prego..!”_

Leo replied in Italian. _“Even if you’re telling the truth, I don’t have the equipment to treat you.”_

The hazel eyes widened in surprise. But the man wasted no time talking about the sudden change of language. He made an obvious effort to speak clearly. _“The hospital will report me to the police. And the police are theirs — the people who want me dead. I cannot fight or run. Not like this. They took out my team. I’m one of the good guys, Leonardo. Please!”_

Leo cursed under his breath. Every ounce of his training and common sense fought against not getting the man proper medical care. Also, Leo knew nothing about him. Not even whether his name was what he claimed it to be.

But... he’d stood in Leo’s kitchen singing goofy love songs. He’d baked them _croissants_ , for god’s sake.

Leo knew he lacked the information required to make a decision based on knowledge. He’d have to operate on instinct. And right now his instincts told him that the man really, truly believed what he’d just said.

“Wait,” he said to Rosa. “Don’t call yet.”

“Why? What did he say?”

“Later. Get my kit from my closet. It’s the big metal briefcase under the shelves.”

“Are you sure?”

She had more reasons to ask than just the obvious. “Yes,” Leo said, avoiding her eyes.

She put her phone on the side table and left.

The Italian’s eyes closed in what looked like utter exhaustion. _“Grazie,”_ he breathed.

Leo knew he shouldn’t have let himself be affected by the look of relief on the man’s face. After all, his decision amounted to gross negligence. Not to mention, suicidal idiocy. _Please forgive me, your_ _Honor_ _, I forgot that withholding a dangerous criminal from the authorities is against the_ _law_ _._ Somehow Leo doubted that explanation would carry his defense in court.

He felt the man’s throat for his pulse. It was fast. His temperature seemed within normal, but Leo didn’t like the way he shivered from time to time, or his color. The skin inside his eyelids wasn’t unnaturally pale, however.

“What have you taken?” No way had the man survived the past eight hours on willpower. And then there was the familiar, ominous gleam in his eyes.

“Morphine. Four hours ago.”

Add to that a truckload of adrenaline, all running out now, and no wonder the man was crashing. Leo ran his fingers down the sides of his throat, checking for signs of obstructed circulation.

“Trouble breathing?”

“No... just hurts like hell.”

“What happened at the mall?”

“Two .45 shots in chest from ten meters... stopped by suit... One th... through arm... superficial...” The man was fighting to stay focused.

So, blunt chest trauma. The list of possibilities was endless. Obviously the worst could be ruled out just by way of the man being still alive, but even with some kevlar in between, the effect of being shot was about the same as a sledge hammer being used by someone who knew how to swing.

_Suit?_

“Do you feel cold? Sleepy? Tingling in the extremities?” Leo checked the man’s fingers. No external signs of blood loss or hypoxia.

The Italian shook his head at all three. So, no obvious symptoms of circulatory shock. The fainting and shivering could be just pain, distress and coming off the drugs. “Try to breathe normally. I know it’s painful, but it’ll get worse if you don’t. If you have trouble breathing or start showing any symptoms of sepsis, I’m calling emergency, bad guys or no.” _And probably get arrested. But I guess that’s better than having to explain why I have a murderer’s corpse stinking up my home._

The man gave a stuttering nod, eyes closed. Apparently he knew what a sepsis was.

Undressing the Italian turned out to be an interesting challenge, and not in the way Leo might have hoped.

After unzipping the hoodie, he saw the suit. _So that’s what kept you alive, you toast-snatching_ _ninja_ _._ It hugged the man’s muscular body like a second skin, made of fine, matte black filaments, weaved together in complicated circular patterns. It wasn’t rigid; it moved sinuously with his breath. Leo couldn’t even begin to guess the material. On top, the man’s torso was covered in a harness that strapped knives, spare magazines and utility packs to his body, splintered where the bullets had hit. Under his arms, two sleek, black semi-automatic pistols lay in quick-draw holsters. Leo had to concentrate on just breathing for a second.

_He’s a killer. He’s a professional killer, and I’m helping him because he’s pretty and makes a mean egg scramble._

“The fuck?” It was Rosa, standing beside them with Leo’s kit hanging from her hand. “Leo, we have to call the police.”

The Italian’s eyes widened. “No! I’m not a bad guy. I can explain... ” He tried to push up to sit and promptly blacked out again.

Leo looked up, pleading wordlessly. After a moment, Rosa nodded, pale and worried, but determined. Leo knew she wouldn’t panic or crumble. Just like she hadn’t panicked or crumbled that one night four years ago.

“Could you get me more light?” he asked, and off she went.

He opened the case. Inside, everything was as he had once left it. He got out his shears and started cutting at the rumpled hoodie and sagging jeans that were a far cry from anything he’d have imagined on the GQ worthy vision from two weeks ago.

Two mean looking blades were attached in some kind of fast-release sheaths inside the man’s forearms. A neatly applied Israeli bandage gripped his right arm above the elbow, soaked through with blood. _Can’t touch that yet._ Leo kept cutting. Through the jacket and jeans. Lower, more flat utility packs were strapped to his thighs, full of Leo didn’t want to know what implements of death.

“Is your name really Ezio Auditore?” he asked when he noticed that the man was awake again.

“Yes,” he rasped, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Rosa returned with a floor lamp and plugged it in, flooding them in its glow.

The ninja suit covered the Italian's arms, torso and legs. The way it compressed his chest had to ease the pain from possible broken ribs, but it also obstructed breathing and prevented Leo from doing his job. It needed to come off, but how? The tactical harnesses opened by way of catches and velcro, but after that, Leo was out of options. He couldn’t see fasteners in the suit’s sleek surface. He had a feeling its material wouldn’t yield to his humble EMT shears.

“Zippers,” the man gasped. “Wrists. Throat.”

_Right._

Calling them ‘zippers’ was like calling the space shuttle _Endeavour_ a plane. The thing opened like a complex, flexible clamshell, baring all too fragile flesh, except where the emergency bandage kept it attached. Beneath, the man’s underwear was thick black microfiber, unlabeled, probably manufactured in the same secret laboratory that had constructed his suit. Leo cut through the shirt.

Two large, evil blooms of hematoma mottled the man’s chest, about a handspan each. It was easy to see where the bullets had struck, pushing the suit into muscle and bone with incredible force, imprinting tissue with its invisible structures. How many cracked and bruised ribs? Impossible to say for certain. But nothing was caved in or poking out. No flail chest, no lung collapse... lucky sod.

Or perhaps luck had little to do with it. Leo doubted a hitman could count on anything as ephemeral as luck to keep himself alive.

“Ezio?”

No reply. Leo looked up.

Out like a light. Had to be pain caused by relief of pressure. The man needed a nerve block or four — but anesthetics injected with help of ultrasound into thoracic nerves was one more thing Leo wasn’t able to provide.

“Try to wake him up,” he said to Rosa and dug for more things from his kit.

This time Mr. Auditore came to about thirty seconds later, grimacing and watering at the eyes. His breath started coming in short, shallow gasps. Leo knew it wasn’t because of the inflatable cuff around his arm.

“You still have some of that morphine left?”

The man nodded and mouthed something that might have been ‘please’.

Leo found a palm-sized drug kit from one of his thigh packs, neatly stacked with color-coded, disposable injector pens. No labels — but the guy had to be a million-euro investment. His handlers wouldn’t want him dead. After asking for the right color, Leo refilled the cuff, swabbed the inside of the man’s elbow and shot him up.

In ten seconds, the man’s breathing eased and some of his tension melted away.

“I love you,” he muttered.

 _Right. At least he still has a sense of humor._ “I don’t like giving you these. It’s too risky.”

“Then don’t. I can handle pain.”

 _I'm sure you can._ “No, I need you to breathe normally so you won’t get pneumonia. I’m going to take a look at your arm, now.”

Beneath the bandage, a ragged tear reached across the man’s biceps and triceps muscles. Some sort of high-tech injectable absorbent had stanched the bleeding, but gunshot wounds were filthy, and this one had been festering under the bandage for hours and hours. Already, a nasty blush was starting in the veins around it. All Leo could do was remove foreign material and nonviable tissue, then gauze and bandage the wound again. However, there was no way to provide proper anesthesia. Anything relevant in Leo’s kit had long since passed expiration date. The man couldn’t be drugged with his mystery opiates to the point where he’d feel nothing, not with the risk of breathing complications. Not unless Leo wanted to tube and bag someone in his own vestibule. Or perform some lovely species of —

“— meatball surgery.”

He raised his head in horror. His hands shook. How long had he been thinking out loud? Rosa was kneeling beside him.

“Want me to call 112?” she asked.

He almost said yes.

Treating someone’s bullet scrape should have been a walk in the park. But it wasn’t. It was faces torn off by shell fire and children used as live mine detectors. It was an emergency cesarean on a girl seven months pregnant, knifed in the stomach because she’d refused to marry the man who’d raped her. It was trying to save a nurse shot point blank in the gut with his bare hands.

Why did he believe the Italian when he said he was one of the good guys?

 _Please help me. I don’t want to die._ The magic words. A calm descended over him. Not because of bravery. He just had no choice. He’d accepted the man as his patient and was now responsible for his life.

“No. Don’t call.” He looked up. The man was watching him, half out of it, but less afraid than before — and not just because of the opiate high.

_He trusts me. Good god._

“I’m going to give you something to bite on. Please try not to kill me,” Leo said and reached for his kit.

o o o

“I lied. I hate pain,” the man said later, weary, but still alive (and now mostly conscious, as opposed to drifting in and out). “My least favorite part of the job.”

About a thousand questions burned Leo’s mind, but he held his silence. The most obvious answers languished somewhere in an intense care unit, fighting for their lives, if not already bagged and tagged.

Mr. Auditore was now lying in Leo’s double bed, tucked up under a fluffy quilt to his chest, thick dark-brown hair spilling against a white pillow. It had been a challenge to get him there, to say the least. After, Leo had sent Rosa out hunting with a shopping list and a stack of prescriptions. (What was even legal in Finland? All Leo knew was the kind of pharmacy one could maintain in a compound where only power outages and extreme weather conditions were guaranteed.)

He checked the man’s vitals again. The wound on his arm was now cleanly bandaged, with just some blood seeping through. Apparently, patching up victims of acute lead poisoning wasn’t something one could easily forget. Not much could be done about the mangled ribs and organs, except apply ice and painkillers. Leo would have to let nature take its course.

“You look like a _dottore_ now,” the man continued. His lovely purr of a voice sounded breathless and hoarse. Exhaustion made his accent so thick that the words drawled over each other.

Was he talking about the stethoscope hanging around Leo’s neck? It certainly couldn’t refer to any sort of professionalism. Leo knew he looked horrible. An ugly moment while cleaning the wound had resulted in blood all over his clothes, which hadn’t been particularly impressive to start with.

Just to do something, Leo checked the guy’s eyes with a penlight to see if the opiates were tapering off. They looked soft and drugged.

“You’re good at this doctor thing, aren’t you, Leonardo?”

“You should try to sleep, Mr. Auditore.”

The man made as if to laugh, paled, and clearly decided not to.

It wasn’t untrue. Leo had been good enough that when all hell broke loose in Mogadishu, the mission leader had given him much more responsibility than he should have. But he didn’t feel like much of a doctor, now. Not with the heavy rock of nausea lying in his gut.

“It was Ezio when you feared for my life,” the guy said. “Now it’s back to Mr. Auditore?”

Leo just shook his head and looked away. _Of all the hitmen in the world, I had to get the friendly one?_

“Please,” the Italian insisted. “I’m in pain. Distract me. You were with MSF?”

“Yes.” Why was it so hard to keep his damn mouth shut? He’d seen enough death to last for a lifetime. The last thing he needed was to befriend one of its little helpers.

“Where?”

“Sudan. Somalia.” Just saying the names resurrected memories of sun and heat and dust.

“Why did you go?”

“Why does anyone? To make a difference. To save lives.” _To find out who I am when everything is taken_ _away_ _._

“What made you stop?”

Leo shrugged. “Cowardice?”

PTSD had nothing to do with cowardice, or so the shrinks told him, but he wasn’t going to use the word. It came with too much baggage.

At last the man fell silent. But when Leo got to his feet, he spoke again.

“I don’t think you’re a coward, Leonardo,” he murmured from the edge of sleep. “I think you’re a very brave man.”

In the kitchen, Leo wrote himself a checklist. Painkillers, obviously — both opiates and anti-inflammatories. Antibiotics. Diazepam to prevent muscle spasms. Ice to reduce swelling. The wound would need to be washed and its dressing changed twice a day. And someone had to keep an eye on the man, to make sure he didn’t start showing signs of respiratory depression or systemic infection or any of the other possible, lovely complications. Then, in a couple of days...

No. The man wouldn’t be there in a couple of days. As soon as he woke up, Leo would make him call someone who could take him away. He’d clean up the mess, go back to his boring life and forget about handsome Italian hitmen and secret ninja organizations that shouldn’t exist.

Forty minutes later Rosa returned with a bag full of medical supplies and drugs strong enough to fell a horse. Leo was pretty sure he would end up rotting in prison.

Somehow he got through the night. After Rosa told him off before leaving for work, bleary-eyed and dubious about the coming day, he set his phone to wake him once in an hour and began stealing moments of stupor on the divan beneath his bedroom window, close enough to the bed to hear if the oximeter he’d attached on the guy’s finger started beeping in alarm.

o o o

No phone calls to relieve him of his charge happened that day. Mr. Ninja had a bad reaction to oxycodone and spent eight hours vomiting, too ill to speak more than a few words. Leo forced as much electrolyte drink down his throat as he dared and tried not to dwell too much on things he could not control, such as the lack of CRP and liver tests, running behind in his work schedule or the increasing severity of consequences, should someone find out that he was hiding a dangerous fugitive.

In the afternoon, said fugitive started feeling marginally better. As a result, his bodily functions began causing trouble. After an argument that consisted mostly of petulant grunts and a detailed description of kidney damage and urinary catheterization, the man stooped to accept help getting to the bathroom. It seemed to mortify him, but Leo was just relieved that he could do it. Some of the side effects of opiates could be downright nasty. Also, truth be told, he wasn’t certain that performing an unpleasant medical procedure was the way he wanted to satisfy his curiosity about the small portion of the Italian’s body he was yet to see. (Well, maybe not _that_ small, going by Rosa’s... Leo slapped himself mentally before he could finish the thought.)

They were both relieved when the ordeal was over. Mr. Auditore fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, and Leo collapsed in front of the TV.

The main channels were still running breaking news about the shootings. By now, the police had released security footage from the second incident at the mall in hopes of getting an identification.

There was no soundtrack. The only audio was provided by the anchor’s prattle. In front of the familiar yellow-and-blue facade of an R-Kioski convenience store Leo sometimes bought papers from, a man walked into the camera’s frame past a group of loitering teenagers, hooded and dressed in black. Without warning, he crumpled to the floor. Civilians fell back, alarmed by gunshots Leo couldn’t hear. Three burly thugs appeared in the picture. One of them stopped near the collapsed man and pointed a gun to his head.

After that, things happened too fast for the camera to have caught everything.

Leo’s mind registered it as a series of trauma. Compound fracture of tibia and fibula. Dislocated knee. Dislocated jaw, possibly broken. Concussion and whiplash, with high probability of cervical spinal injury and brain damage. Organ ruptures and internal hemorrhage, fatal if not treated within minutes. The security guards who appeared in the scene next stood no chance whatsoever. At least he seemed to take them down a bit more gently.

It was hard to reconcile the sight with the knowledge that the guy in Leo’s bedroom couldn’t get to the bathroom without help. Adrenaline was indeed one hell of a drug.

Leo spent the next hour or so poking through the guy’s things. In his sleep-deprived state of mind, he almost felt like a kid again, trying to weigh information against its cost — which in this case might be something worse than just forfeiting his weekly allowance after dismantling yet another piece of domestic machinery.

From the scrapes and tears left by the bullets, Leo saw that the suit was constructed of layers upon layers of interwoven materials. The tech embedded in it might as well have been magic. The wrist blades with their sleek automatics looked like something manufactured by Bang & Olufsen. The other weapons were more conventional, but an identical matte black finish still rendered them a matching appearance — handguns, knives, even a rewinding spool of fishing line which Leo regarded with open horror.

Leave it to the Italians to make murder look stylish. _Death, the Spring Collection, designed by Giorgio Armani._

The pistols were loaded, of course. One was a classic, aging 9 millimeter Beretta. The other a shiny new Five-seven, its steel-tipped cartridge designed to pierce soft body armor, or so the good old internet claimed. Leo unloaded the things and hid all the ammunition he could find. Then he stashed the guy’s impressive array of knives so high and far on top of a cupboard that even he couldn’t get to them without a chair.

The utility packs were full of emergency kits, tools, weapon accessories and miniature tech. No ID of any kind, nor communication devices. No earpiece, no walkie-talkie... not even the phone the guy had used to call Rosa from the street.

_They took out my team._

Leo realized he’d just effectively made himself into the man’s new team. Not a very comforting thought. And who were ‘they’? Probably someone with the ability to swat him out like a fly, and few compunctions against doing so.

Leo woke up Sleeping Beauty to put more antibiotics and painkillers in him. Then he spent the next couple of hours napping on the couch before Rosa returned, looking rather the worse for wear.

He didn’t ask her about her day. After seeing her face, he didn’t need to.

“He’s still here?” she stated rather than asked after collapsing on the other couch without even removing her coat.

Leo sat up under the blanket, groggy and disoriented. He carded his fingers through his tangled hair. He realized he’d forgotten to comb it after showering.

“Last I looked.”

She groaned and kicked off her shoes. “Unbelievable. I fucked a fucking spy.”

For a moment, they stared into emptiness in companionable disbelief. Outside at Tehtaankatu, the busiest afternoon traffic was starting to wind down.

After a while, Leo reached for the remote. It didn’t take too long for the next news broadcast to start.

Francesco de’ Pazzi had died during the night. Unsurprisingly, the search for his killer had turned up nothing. The police were beginning to believe that he’d crossed the border. One of the Kamppi gunmen had died, another was comatose. The third refused to speak to the authorities. The security guards were unable to give much of a description on the perp, except for a vague ‘he might have been a foreigner’. No reports of a deceased ninja team turning up somewhere in the greater metropolitan area were disclosed.

“I don’t think he’s a spy,” Leo said after the newscast ended. “I’m guessing he’s an operative in some kind of private organization.”

“Private like the Knights of Malta or like the Camorra?”

“He said he had a team. That doesn’t sound like a simple hitman. The kind of tech he’s carrying could be government, but I’m pretty sure that a secret service agent wouldn’t have to turn to a civilian for help.” _And frankly, I doubt a government would pay that much for design._

“Do you think he’s who he says he is?”

Leo shrugged. “I googled him earlier and there _has_ been an Ezio Auditore around for several years who looks a hell of a lot like him.”

“So that’s his cover identity?”

“Sure, why not? A millionaire playboy by day, a cold-blooded killer by night...”

“Shit. I shagged Batman?”

Perhaps the comparison wasn’t as ludicrous as it sounded, thinking of the jaw-dropping skill with which the man had dispatched the thugs in the surveillance video. “I went through his stuff. It’s kind of fascinating, really —”

Rosa snorted morosely. “Leave it to you to call this fascinating _._ I still think we should call the police.”

Leo explained what the guy had said to him in Italian the night before, about what would happen if the law enforcement found him.

“So?” Rosa asked. “I mean, sure, for a murderer he’s sweet and charming and maybe the best shag of my life, but this is putting _us_ in danger, Leo. From several different directions.”

“I know. But I don’t want his life on my conscience.”

“Please tell me you’re not doing this because of his pretty brown eyes.”

“Of course not.”

It wasn’t entirely a lie. Leo wanted to believe he would have done the same if the man had looked like an orangutan.

Rosa groaned and pushed to her feet. “I gotta crash. Wake me up if the _Karhu-ryhmä_ comes knocking on our door with an adze. Don’t laugh, asshole! It could happen, you know.”

She was right. It could happen, and the possibility wasn’t amusing in the least. Leo collapsed back on the couch, trying to control his demented wheezing.

The Helsinki Police spec-ops and counter terrorism unit did not pay a nocturnal visit. The next morning, Leo woke up wrapped in a blanket on his divan, fully clothed, to see that his bed was empty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for: mentions of rape and children being killed or mutilated


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When publishing a new chapter, I always feel like I should thank my betas and proofreaders. You're so helpful and amazing, guys. Totally prevented me from making an ass of myself, once again :D

Leo snatched his glasses from the floor and sprung up from the divan, then spent the next seconds groaning and clutching at his head and back. _Really?_ _I’ve just turned thirty-five and I’m already_ _too old to sleep_ _on anything that isn’t made of memory foam?_ It was difficult to believe he’d once slept in cars, hammocks and on the hard ground without feeling much the worse for wear.

Part of him expected the Italian to be long gone. It would have been a miracle in his condition, but what about the past two days had not defied belief? However, when Leo hobbled out of the bedroom, he saw the man almost at once.

Aside from ripped muscle and near-nakedness, the sight bore little resemblance to the singing vision of two weeks ago. The young man hunched at Leo’s kitchen table in a pair of black boxer briefs was the picture of misery. Livid black and blue contusions covered his chest. Only slightly less alarming bruises decorated the rest of his body. The way he hung his head against his hand told Leo everything necessary about his state of mind. In passing Leo noticed that although the bandage still circled his arm, the oximeter was nowhere to be seen.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Leo had once used the same voice to stop armed thugs from raiding the compound in Sudan.

Slowly the Italian looked up, brown hair tumbling over eyes and hand. He had enough decency to look chastised. Then he pulled his mouth into a sheepish little grin. It negated a bit of what his ill color and the dark shadows under his eyes did to his good looks.

“ _Buongiorno, principe_ _,_ _”_ he whispered. Leo recognized the words as a deliberate misquote from _La vita è bella._ “Sorry I can’t make breakfast today.”

Unbelievable. Shot to meat jelly and addled by painkillers, the damned guy was trying to _charm_ his way out of having his head chewed off? Leo stopped near the table and crossed his arms. It was hard to project an air of authority in a pair of sweatpants, t-shirt and a bathrobe, but he tried.

“I haven’t said you can get out of bed, let alone eat!”

“I was hungry,” the guy muttered, hunching even lower as if trying make his brawny olympic gymnast’s figure appear smaller. Indeed, there was a nearly empty quark container in front of him, as well as an emptied bowl that might once have contained cereal and milk.

Well, it was an improvement that the man was now able to move on his own. And after vomiting his guts out the day before, hunger had to be another good sign. But Leo’s instinct howled to him that the fool was supposed to be in bed — and preferably restrained, to prevent him from doing anything stupid, like falling over and tearing something open, or dislodging a blood clot that was keeping him from bleeding dry, or — oh, right... racking up the body count of his Finland visit?

How the hell was there a professional hitman sitting in Leo’s kitchen in his shorts, again? And which part of ‘extremely dangerous’ did Leo’s caveman brain have difficulty understanding? Big brown puppy eyes be damned, he was _not_ going to make the mistake of assuming that the guy was harmless. By now, he’d seen the security footage from the mall about five times and suspected that the man could have put him in a hospital with just two fingers working.

“This yogurt has gone bad, Leonardo,” the hitman muttered, blinking owlishly at his quark. “It is very sour.”

Leo blew out a breath and made an effort to appear more civil.

“I take it that you feel better?”

Mr. Auditore put down his spoon. He was starting to seem a bit green around the edges. “I thought so. I’m not so sure, any more.”

“You should go back to bed. Come, I’ll help.”

The look of hurt Latin pride Leo received as he went around the table and extended his arm was familiar from the trip to the loo the day before.

How adorable. A trained killer, scowling at him like a rebellious five-year-old. Or perhaps rather a drugged Bengal tiger. But apparently Mr. Ninja was still hurting too much to cling to his hauteur, for when Leo helped him from the chair, he only objected with his expression. He didn’t groan or whimper, either, but from the way his breath stuttered as they made their way to the bedroom, he was a long way from being remotely okay.

After Mr. Auditore was in bed again with a quilt thrown over his nakedness, Leo started counting out pills from the medicine bottles and packs he’d left on the nightstand.

“So. How exactly are you feeling today?”

The man muttered something that probably wasn’t an offer to turn cartwheels. The sight of his tousled head and bare shoulders against a fluffy pillow reminded Leo of the hard divan and his own aching skull.

“Filthy,” Mr. Auditore said, then, eyes closed. “I need a long shower. And a change of clothes.”

Clothes. Oh, yeah. What was the guy going to wear? No amount of stitching would put his jeans and hoodie back together. Not that Leo ever wanted to see those ugly things again, but it did pose a practical problem.

“You can use my clothes, if you find something that fits, but the shower is going to have to wait.” Leo already deserved a medal for the level of professionalism he’d been able to maintain. The last thing he needed was to endanger his dignity by nursing the man through a shower.

Mr. Auditore’s scarred mouth twisted into a wry smile. “How about a bed bath?”

Leo’s hand jerked. About a dozen tablets spilled from the bottle in it. He shoved the container back on the table and started picking away the excess pills from his palm, blushing even as the Italian tried very hard not to snicker.

“ _Maremma,”_ the guy wheezed, blanching. “Hurts.”

“Nice to see that you’re in good spirits, Mr. Auditore.”

“Please. Ezio.”

Leo placed the pills on the nightstand. They made a respectable pile there, beside a glass of water.

“Here you go,” he said. _“Bon appetit.”_

“Why so many?”

“Because you need them. In a hospital, all of this would be pumped into you through an IV. You wouldn’t even know.”

“They make me sleep too much.”

Leo crossed his arms. “You have to be in a lot of pain. Sleeping is not necessarily a bad thing.”

The man gave him a dark look from beneath his brows, as if to convey the idea that dangerous creatures of the night such as him never slept, or only did so with one eye open, or some such nonsense.

Leo pinched the bridge of his nose.

“All right, the long explanation. That goon’s hand cannon cracked at least three of your ribs. You can’t breathe properly without painkillers. Not breathing properly can lead to pneumonia. If you find laughing painful, imagine how bad coughing out your lungs will be. There would be better options for pain relief in a hospital, but here, it’s happy pill time for you. As for the rest, I can’t say for sure without opening you up and taking a look, but I’d say you’ve bruised your liver and right kidney and that you may be in danger of developing complications that may cause heart failure. Also, if you move too much, you might start bleeding inside and drop dead anyway. So I suggest you eat the medication I give you and stay in bed. That being said, I guess it’s safe to assume from your increased mobility that you will survive. You’re just going to be very sore for quite some time. You should apply ice several times a day, I’ll get you some now.” Leo turned to go. “Oh, and put that damn oxygen meter back on your finger, will you? In case you’d like me to notice if you stop breathing in your sleep, that is.”

When he returned, the pills and water were gone, and the oximeter was once more secured on Mr. Auditore’s left forefinger.

Leo handed over two packs of ice. Then he placed the rest of the things he’d brought on a chair and settled on the edge of the bed to tend to the gunshot wound on Mr. Auditore’s arm.

Beneath the dressing, the open injury still leaked, but it no longer seemed to be in acute danger of infection. Leo started cleaning it with sponge and water. It couldn’t be pleasant, but his patient suffered through his administrations without complaint. In a month or two, the ugly gash would be just another scar that marred his olive skin.

What a waste. All that physical perfection... used for murder.

Leo sensed the Italian’s eyes on him. Despite pain and weariness, they were intent with the curiosity he remembered well from two weeks ago.

“You’re angry,” the man murmured, eventually, the ice packs on his chest barely moving with breath.

Leo frowned. “Excuse me?”

“Before, you always smiled. Now, not so much.”

True enough, remarkably little of Leo’s usual inane smiling had been occurring over the past couple of days.

“Are you angry at me, Leonardo?”

“Doesn’t it hurt to speak?” Leo asked, a bit sharper than intended.

“Not more than to breathe.”

 _Can’t take a hint or doesn’t want to?_ Leo took a towel to pat the man’s arm dry. After a moment, the soft muttering continued.

“I’m sorry I have to drag you into this. You’re a good man, I know. I want you to know how much I appreciate everything that you have done for —”

Leo picked a thermometer from the table and stuck it in Mr. Auditore’s mouth.

By the time the instrument started beeping, he was done. The wound was clean and dry, and a neat, fresh dressing covered it around his patient’s muscular arm. Leo took the thermometer from his mouth and observed the numbers on it.

“Well, you don’t have a fever,” he said.

“ _Ottimo._ Can I speak now?”

“You should save your energy for —”

 _Oh, hell._ Leo looked down.

By now, he’d touched the Italian times enough to know intimately how it felt — the weight and hardness of his body, the sinuous strength that seemed ridiculously overpowered to just move around one man. But if he’d hoped that impersonal contact would inoculate him against less professional intimacy, he’d been pathetically wrong.

The hand that now held his own was not that of a desperate man clinging to him for help. It had nothing to do with Leo doing his job as a medic. It was strong and unhesitating, and Leo’s response to even such a simple touch made him realize why it was so hard to allow himself to think of the man as anything except _Mr. Auditore_ or _the Italian._ It was all he could do not to shiver all over.

When he looked up, a pair of light-brown eyes gazed straight into his own, earnest and urgent.

God, but the man was beautiful. Even drugged and dirty and covered in horrible bruises — even after seeing him puke and weep and bleed — he was so beautiful that Leo wanted to cry.

“Leonardo. You saved my life.”

“Nonsense,” Leo heard himself blurt. “You’re in excellent health. You would have pulled through.”

The light touch became the beginning of a grip.

“No. My enemies would have killed me. Or infection. Ask anything of me, and I will give it to you. Anything. I swear on my honor as an Auditore.”

 _It’s the drugs. He’s just saying whatever. Probably won’t even remember._ Leo clung to the crumbling veneer of his professionalism. He retrieved his hand with as much tact as he could and started cleaning up.

_Make him call someone. Now._

“Can you — um — I mean — do you have someone you can call? You can use my phone.”

“No. Not with yours. It is too dangerous.”

“Right, right. Well, uh. I’ll take these away, now.”

“Please, one more thing. Francesco de’ Pazzi. Is he dead?”

It seemed pointless to withhold the truth or pretend that he didn’t follow the news. “Yes.”

The hazel eyes blinked. Then Mr. Auditore nodded and looked away. Leo got the feeling he was looking at something else than the room with its design furniture mixed with messy bookcases and exercise things, or the discarded clothing and stacks of papers and books and even some long-forgotten art supplies littering every raised surface.

“ _Finally,”_ he murmured in Italian. _“Now the world will judge you for what you’ve done, Francesco. Requiescat in pace..!”_

In moments he seemed to be asleep again, knocked out by the painkillers.

After disposing of the bloodied dressings the best he could, Leo looked at his laptop on the kitchen table and realized to his amazement that the past thirty hours had to be the longest time in eight years that he hadn’t worked. He made himself breakfast, sat down and opened his computer.

Both his email and calendar were full of notifications. He already knew from checking the time on his muted phone that missed calls and texts were piling up on it, too. Weren’t normal people supposed to rest during the weekend, or something..?

It took him far longer than usual to triage his messages. Fortunately only a couple questions demanded his immediate attention, and both were possible to answer even without the benefit of a working cerebral cortex. But then there was the matter of an important presentation coming up next week. The project was still in early enough stages to shoot from the hip and make it sound convincing enough to the stakeholders, but he needed numbers to flesh out the powerpoint, and the queries required to produce them from immense data warehouses could take days to run.

Usually writing a few MapReduce functions would have taken Leo about fifteen minutes. Now he struggled with it for well over an hour. He couldn’t stop thinking about the warmth of blood on his hands, or the smell of hot dust, or the murmur of Benadir and Arabic from years gone by.

Finished at last, he wrote a few emails to beg off from his meetings early the following week. At his pay grade, he could only hope that his reputation could buffer the price of a few raised eyebrows.

Eventually, Rosa appeared from her room to ask if Jason Bourne was still alive.

“Sure.” Leo pointed at the nearly finished quark on the table while still typing. “Even crawled here to eat.”

Rosa glanced at the container and made a face.

“ _Yäk!_ I thought he had good taste.” She picked up the thing, dropped it in the trash and started making herself an espresso or four.

After sending in the last email, Leo stared at his laptop without seeing much.

Hearing Rosa rummage through the meager contents of their fridge made him remember that someone needed to go shopping for groceries soon. No hitman parts remained on the floor, and with said hitman himself stashed away in Leo’s room it was probably safe to order in, but they were running dangerously low on crucial necessities, such as milk, orange juice, Weetabix and medium dark roast fair trade arabica.

“So, did he call someone?” Rosa returned with a coffee mug and a few rice cakes. As usual, the black sludge in her cup looked thick enough to shovel down with a spoon.

“No, he said he can’t use my phone. I guess I should have realized.”

“Oh. Of course. He needs a _burner phone_.” She used the English expression — there was no Finnish equivalent.

“A what?”

“Yeah, I forgot that your idea of TV entertainment consists of documentaries about the Prague Spring. It means a cheap prepaid shit phone that you can trash whenever. I suggest you leave it to me. As someone who has seen almost every episode of The Wire and Breaking Bad, I’m probably the expert on criminal communication in this household.”

“All right... I’ll try to keep him alive, meanwhile.”

Rosa snorted. “You mean you’ll hover over him like a mother hen, afraid that he’ll drop dead if you as much as blink? I bet that if a bear with a stick up its ass appeared on our door, you’d try to nurse it back to health, too.”

Leo was starting to suspect that Rosa was not in a great mood. Then again, neither was he.

“Should I remind you that we wouldn’t even be in this mess if it wasn’t for your raging ovaries?”

Rosa frowned. “I didn’t know he’s the bloody Léon _,_ alright?”

“Wait. Are you trying to tell me that knowing that would have _decreased_ your interest in him..?”

“Fuck you.”

After the infantile three-second pleasure of winning an argument by _ad hominem_ passed, Leo immediately felt bad. It was wrong to speak in such a manner, even if he was right. But when he opened his mouth to apologize, Rosa sighed and obviously gave up trying to be angry at him.

“Leo, look. I’m crazy and I trust you a hell of a lot more than I should, so I’m not going to call the cops. But I don’t want to go to jail, either. I have a life. A _busy_ one.”

“And I don’t?”

“ _You_ decided to go all field medic on him. You’ve kind of forfeited your right to whine.”

It was her turn to be right. Leo leaned back in his chair. “Rosa, I don’t want to fight. I need your help.”

“Well, speaking of that, I just remembered that I have a business trip coming up in two days.”

 _Shit._ Leo winced. “I forgot.”

“Know what? I did, too.”

They both did their fair share of traveling for work. Leo had an overseas meeting lined up in a few weeks, too. But maybe the timing for Rosa’s trip was not a total disaster? It would take her out of harm’s way. She didn’t deserve to become collateral damage to Leo’s stupidity.

He couldn’t help thinking how very Finnish it all was. A man’s life was on the line — possibly theirs, too — and still they both tried to keep doing their jobs and acting normal.

“It’s that big client in Hamburg,” she said. “I can’t cancel. Paula would skin me.”

“No. Don’t,” he said. “In fact, it’s better if you go.”

“The hell it’s better! Someone has to make sure your brain doesn’t melt!”

“I’m sure that if my brain was going to do any such thing, it would have happened already.”

Rosa scowled. “Yeah, well, excuse me if I disagree. I know how good you are at keeping your shit together on the outside. You may have forgotten, but I remember the way you were back when we met. The nightmares and the bad days.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Leo murmured.

“Well, what is it, then? You still think you can save everyone? Even if it ends badly for you? What if that guy doesn’t deserve to be saved? He offed a fucking mafia boss. Do you think he’s on the side of the angels? Which reminds me, have you asked who he’s working for?”

“No. The less I know, the better.”

She gaped. “What? Are you fucking kidding me? Leo, you’re the most stupidly curious person I’ve ever met! You must be dying to ask questions. Even I want to know a few things. In fact, fuck this shit. I’m going there right now.”

She started to get up. Leo reached across the table to prevent her.

“Please! Don’t. We shouldn’t get involved.”

“Leo...” She watched him, her expression a mix of pity and frustration. “I’m sorry, honey, but we’re already involved. You kind of saw to that yourself.”

o o o

In the end, Leo managed to convince her that it was better if he handled things for a while longer. It involved admitting that she was right, and that Leo was a coward who really should take her advice about asking some hard questions.

Throughout the day, the Italian defied Leo’s order to stay horizontal twice. Both times he did so to drag himself to the bathroom and back. In the afternoon, Leo made him eat some porridge with cottage cheese. The guy obeyed with more obedience than actual hunger, and then fell back into a coma, or something that very nearly resembled it.

With the evening approaching, Leo returned to his bedroom-cum-sickbay with a cheap Nokia phone in his hand. Faithful to her HBO sources, Rosa had spent the grand total of twenty-five euros on it.

“Here,” Leo said from where he stood near the foot of the bed. “Prepaid. Bought with cash. Is that paranoid enough for you?”

Mr. Auditore peeled the quilt from his ears. His drowsy eyes turned toward the phone, then to Leo.

“Can’t wait to get rid of me, eh?”

“No, I’m absolutely thrilled about your continued presence under my roof.” Leo bit his tongue. He was usually better with people than this. “Look, I don’t want to be an asshole, but if you have someone to call...” _Please do it before I get sucked deeper into this rabbit’s hole?_

Mr. Auditore sighed and, with some difficulty, dragged himself up to sit against the pillows.

The quilt slid down to reveal the swathe of deep bruises that was spreading over the man’s mauled ribs. It was closing in on four hours since his last batch of meds. He had to be starting to really feel it. But it was also the time when he could be trusted to be at his most lucid — or at least not floating through the clouds in an benzo/opiate la-la land.

“ _Va bene,”_ he said. Leo was not sure that the sudden politeness in his voice was a good thing. “I apologize. I will call my uncle. He will send someone at once.”

Leo took the couple of steps needed to press the Nokia in Mr. Auditore’s hand. But as he made to go, the man grunted in objection.

“Please stay. I may need you.”

 _Need me for what?_ But Leo had no real reason to object. He settled in the chair he’d left near the bed, arms folded, long legs straightened in front of him, one on top of the other. Mr. Auditore sat back, dialed a number from memory and raised the phone to his ear.

“ _Ciao, bellezza,”_ he said after a moment, clearly mustering as much amiability as he could. It still sounded remarkably more somber than when he’d ordered a taxi what now seemed like an eternity ago. _“How are you? Oh, I’m fine, just a bit of a flu. Can you put me through to Uncle? Thank you, sweetheart.”_

There was a long pause. While it lasted, Mr. Auditore tried to find a better position against the pillows and headboard. Leo told himself he was watching the man squirm only to make sure he didn’t hurt himself.

Then, _“Good evening, Uncle.”_

The muffled exclamation from the speaker was loud enough to make the Italian draw the phone away from his ear. It occurred to Leo that until now, he and Rosa might have been the only two people who knew that the young Mr. Auditore was still alive.

“ _Calm down, Uncle,”_ the guy said with a small smile. _“Yes, I’m alive. Listen. I’m still in Helsinki. I’m_ _a little_ _banged up and need to come home. Could you send someone to get me?”_

No vaguely technical spy-babble, no weird code names. It sounded more... domestic than Leo had expected. But at least the message was clear. So, not long, now. Perhaps only a few hours?

“ _Yes, a_ _doctor_ _helped me. — No, a male_ _doctor_ _, Uncle. — No, he’s not a beautiful transvest—”_ The man glanced at Leo, mildly scandalized. _“Uncle..! He saved my life, please show some respect. His name is Leo Valta.”_ He spelled out Leo’s name. _“Yes, he’s right here. He’s — eh?_ _Oh_ _. All right.”_

The guy took the phone from his ear. “My Uncle wants to speak with you,” he said and offered the Nokia to Leo, who was still trying to process the fact that his identity had just been disclosed to someone who could very well turn out to be some sort of criminal overlord.

 _Oh_ _, no. No._ “I don’t really see how that’s necessary.”

“Please..?”

A pair of soulful brown eyes pleaded and Leo found himself strangely incapable of saying no. He took the Nokia and raised it gingerly to his ear.

“ _Pronto?”_

“ _Ah, you speak Italian, Mr. Valta. Excellent.”_ The voice was that of a man in his fifties, sonorous and impressive, used to command and undoubtedly also being obeyed. _“Good evening. My name is Mario Auditore. My nephew tells me that you saved his life. Is this true?”_

“ _He exaggerates, sir.”_

Leo heard a deep chuckle from the other end. _“He does that. But perhaps not in this case. Needless to say, my nephew’s_ _friends_ _are my_ _friends_ _. None more so than ones who have done him such a great favor. Are you a rich man, Mr. Valta?”_

What the hell kind of a question was that?

“ _No, but I’m not poor.”_ Leo considered himself fairly well-off, but to the head of an international holding company (and who knew what else) he had to appear positively destitute.

“ _I see. Are you married?”_

Curiouser and curiouser. _“No.”_

“ _And do you consider yourself a good doctor?”_

“ _I — yes, sir.”_ Well, in certain areas. Maybe not so much in others.

“ _Excellent. Please tell me, what is your professional assessment of my nephew’s physical condition?”_

Perhaps being blunt would make the man step on it?

“ _Broken ribs and heavy internal bruising. Injured in the arm. He needs surgery if there’s nerve damage. He has to stay in bed for a week and he shouldn’t exercise for a month._ _Six_ _to eight weeks to recovery._ _Six_ _months until the bones are completely healed.”_

“ _I see. Thank you, doctor, I appreciate your honesty. Please return the telephone to my nephew. Goodbye.”_

Bewildered, Leo handed the Nokia back to the younger Auditore, who pressed it to his ear.

“ _Uncle, please. What is the point of —”_

He fell silent. For a time he merely listened, emotions fleeting on his expressive face so quickly that they were difficult to decipher. Then he suddenly tried to push up from the pillows.

“ _For the love of — I must come home! — No! I have to protect — No, Uncle, but I heal fast! You_ _know_ _that I can’t just — Damn you! You can’t force me to—!”_

He closed his eyes and pressed his lips together, almost shaking with effort. It had to hurt like hell to move so violently and to raise his voice. Visibly controlling himself, he reclined back against the pillows.

“ _No, of course not. I understand,”_ he continued through his teeth. _“Fine, Uncle, whatever you say. When can I call you again? — Of course. Yes, in God’s name, I promise..! Take care of Mother. Tell Claudia... well, just tell her that I’m alive.”_

After finishing the call, Mr. Auditore dropped the phone on the bed and ran a hand through his messy hair.

With all the half boyish, half macho charm suddenly gone, Leo realized how much it defined the man. It seemed like someone had turned off a light inside him. His face was grim and pale, and Leo could tell that it wasn’t only because of the pain.

“What’s wrong?” Leo asked, out of habit switching to English — Italian wasn’t his best language by far.

As if mildly surprised that he was still there, Mr. Auditore looked up, obviously coming back from about a thousand kilometers away in his head.

“Will your uncle send someone?” Something in Leo refused to believe what he already suspected to be the answer.

The man shook his head.

“Why?” Leo asked.

The reply was a reluctant grunt, as if speaking had somehow become ten times more painful. “We’re at war.”

“Excuse me?”

Mr. Auditore looked away again.

“I took out the Pazzi _capo_. Things went... bad. They wiped out my team. They found out who I am. Now Francesco’s son Vieri is in charge, and he has declared war on us. He’s a sadistic bastard who will stop at nothing to get revenge. My Uncle — our boss — he thinks that I should stay here. I cannot fight, and our enemies think that I have left Finland, so he says I am safer here.”

Leo felt his blood run cold. _War_ _._ _Boss_ _. Family._ The words rang with a familiar, ominous theme.

He’d always assumed Florence to be a peaceful and civilized city. But he was not an expert on the topic. Perhaps organized crime just had to operate more discreetly there than in places like Campania and Sicily?

“Where will you stay?” he asked, dreading the answer.

“My Uncle will pay fifty thousand euro for you to hide and treat me. He will arrange ten thousand on Monday, and allowance to cover my expenses. The rest will be paid when I’m back in Italy.”

The surreal atmosphere of the past two days seemed to condense.

Leo had already noticed the change in Mr. Auditore’s English. Back when they’d met, he’d sounded like a character from a cheeky B-list movie. Now his accent, while still heavy with the melody and phonetics of his native language, seemed far more natural. And while it was difficult to say for sure with the meds and pain muddling the picture, his body language seemed different, too — less boisterous, more simmering with something just beneath the surface.

The harmless womanizer Leo had met two weeks ago had been a lie. All he knew now was that the man in front of him had killed at least two people not very long ago.

“What if I say no?” Leo choked out.

“I don’t know. My Uncle did not say.”

 _Of course not. Because it’s not an option._ “I don’t want the money.”

“Just take it. He will send it anyway.”

Leo knew that he wasn’t being paid for services rendered. At least, not ones he could have refused. There might have been a frosting of politeness on top, but if he was correct, this Mario Auditore was not a man who asked for consent. The cash was there to seal a done deal — to make him appear complicit in case something went wrong.

“How long would you need to stay?”

“Two or three weeks. Maybe more.”

“Three weeks!” Leo had that presentation coming up in less than that. About a dozen meetings. And then there was his business trip. How was he going to be able to prepare? Three weeks with this man confined in his home — this beautiful stranger who had turned out to be a mobster, and who knew what else —

“Impossible. I can’t — oh, God.” Leo leaned forward. For a second, he was certain he would hyperventilate, or throw up, or both.

“My Uncle does not usually leave others a choice,” Mr. Auditore said quietly. “Is it now time for more painkillers?”

Afterwards, Leo found himself in the kitchen, staring out at the sky that was slowly turning a deeper blue.

The first lights were being switched on in the pink Jugendstil apartment building across the street. The clarity of the spring evening seemed merciless and revealing. It should have been November, instead — black, wet and bleak. Leo hated those last months of the year with as much passion as he could conjure for anything that didn’t choose to be nasty and horrible, but he had to admit that it would have been the perfect time for hiding secrets.

Eventually, he heard familiar footsteps from behind him in the darkening loft. Rosa padded to stand beside him in the luminous dusk. Until now, she’d stayed back like he’d asked — if not without threats about what she’d do if he failed to ‘straighten this shit out pretty fucking fast.’ She threaded an arm around his elbow.

“Hey,” she said from the level of his shoulder. “What happened? Do I need to go kick some Batman butt for you? I’ll do it, you know. Just say the word.”

“No, it’s okay,” Leo said. “He’s sleeping. I think.”

“Did he use the phone?”

“Yeah.”

When he failed to continue, she swayed against him. “Come on, don’t keep me in suspense. I’m dying here.”

“Well, he’ll have to stay for a time. Three weeks, at least.”

He felt her stiffen. “What? What for?”

“I’m not sure it’s safe to tell you.” _I’m not sure_ _that I even_ _know_ _enough to say anything, yet._

“Leo...”

“Well, let’s just say that he’s definitely not a Knight of Malta,” Leo mumbled.

“Oh.” Rosa turned to look out of the window, as well.

“Crap,” she said, then, breaking the silence.

“Yeah.”

“So, how about finally calling the police?”

_We’re already involved. You kind of saw to that yourself._

“I think it’s now too late,” Leo said.

For once Rosa had nothing to say. For a long while, they just stood there arm in arm and watched the night slowly crawl over the low skyline of downtown Helsinki.

 


	5. Chapter 5

The sound that woke Leo the following morning had his heart pounding before he was even awake. In igniting panic, he fumbled for his glasses, then realized where he was and lay still, waiting for his pulse to settle and the world to realign itself.

The surface beneath him was that of a soft couch, not a hard floor. He was wearing his own clothes, not a white t-shirt with a red logo on its back. And instead of African heat, the air he breathed had the fresh sting of Finnish spring air — only tangy with the fading smell of solvent and gun oil.

He wasn’t going crazy, though. The sound he’d heard _had_ been that of a pistol being loaded. And as soon as he’d moved, the loft had become ominously silent, as if he’d interrupted something bad from happening.

The sun was just about to rise, so it couldn’t be more than six in the morning. Leo remembered having worked until past midnight. On the floor nearby, his MacBook lay open, darkened, but he knew that if he touched it, it would bring up a browser full of research on Credito Internazionale and its subsidiaries, as well as various news articles and features about Mario Emanuele Auditore, elusive business mogul and capitalist extraordinaire.

He pushed up from the sofa and turned toward the kitchen. With all the blinds drawn, the place was still rather dim, but in the light of a lamp placed on the dinner table, the first thing he saw was that the Italian had some clothes on again.

How in the name of the holy scientific method was that the first thought that came to Leo’s mind, he’d never know. The fact that a young mobster had ransacked his closet for a few items of exercise wear should probably have paled in importance compared to the selection of firearms and knives placed in front of him on the table, on top of old newspapers and kitchen towels. But Leo’s brain insisted on focusing on his appearance, down to the golden cross hanging around his neck, the t-shirt and zip hoodie that struggled to fit his arms and shoulders, and the bare toes that peeked from under Leo’s extra-long track pants.

The man watched him warily, the Five-seven in his hand, as if waiting to be told off. Then, with deliberate slowness, he placed the gun on the table. It landed there with a heavy thud. He took his other pistol, the old Beretta, and started taking it apart with the competence of a seasoned soldier.

“Sleep well?” His voice was still little more than a low murmur, as controlled as the way he fanned each gun part in front of him.

Leo looked at the throw pillows he’d kicked from the couch to make room for his oversized limbs. His speech circuits seemed to have failed to wake up with the rest of him. But apparently silence was all that was needed for a reply.

“I can sleep on the couch from now on,” the man continued.

Leo found his voice. “No, absolutely not, in your condition.”

“If you say so.” The Italian wound a piece of cloth around a cleaning rod and started to scrub the inside of the gun’s barrel. Leo peeled himself off the couch and went to the bathroom.

After washing up, he stared in the mirror and wondered what the Leo of ten years ago would have done.

In appearance, he’d changed little from those times. The beard was new, but his hair remained styled in the same messy blond waves that reached his shoulders, and aside from a few crow’s feet, there were no visible lines on his face. So far, his physique seemed to have forgiven him for the passing of years — and there was no doubt that his vanity preferred it that way. But truth be told, it felt like a lie, to still look the same when his life had turned out so different from what he’d planned.

Was he still in there, somewhere? That kid who once boarded a ferry to Stockholm to try and save the world with other crazies? _He_ wouldn’t have been scared of getting involved. Leo wasn’t sure he would have taken advice on anything more important than what brand of socks to choose from that guy, but sometimes he missed having courage that was yet to be tempered by failure.

He pushed away from the sink and went back.

At the dinner table, the Italian was now shining a tiny flashlight inside the gun’s barrel. Leo drew himself a glass of water, walked over and sat down.

No sign of the death-and-pain-defying joviality from the previous day could be seen. Mr. Auditore looked tired and grim, his dark brows set in a frown, his lips a no-nonsense line. With a hoodie covering the bandage and bruises, one could almost forget that he was injured, if not for the ashen tone of his skin and the shadows under his eyes. Leo had a feeling that he could have taken the pistol apart and put it back together in fifteen seconds blindfolded, but now he seemed to take his time to brush the fouling from its parts.

Leo considered saying something about the fact that he’d hidden the weapons for a reason. But what would have been the point? If the Italian wasn’t a complete idiot, he already knew what Leo thought about the matter.

“So. Not very good at this bed rest thing, are you?” he asked, instead.

The man’s mouth twitched, signaling an emotion Leo couldn’t read. “I hate being helpless.”

“Are you in a lot of pain?”

“A little.”

A whole lot, more like. The equipment on the table — and the golden cross around the man’s neck — had to have come from the utility packs in his gear. It must have been intensely uncomfortable, to go through his things and to retrieve the ammunition and knives from the hiding places Leo had chosen. But then, Leo already knew that simple physical discomfort did not deter the man from doing his job. The idea of being that familiar with pain made him feel ill.

“You should take your medication. And I need to start you on breathing exercises.”

“Not yet. I have to finish this.”

Away went the brush and in came a small bottle. Dirty, blunt-fingered hands rotated the Beretta’s slide and applied gun oil in its mechanics. The solvent and oil were toxic, but Leo could only guess that in his line of work, the Italian wasn’t going to care if his life expectancy was reduced by a year or two.

 _Who are you?_ How hard could it be to say three simple words? A few soft phonemes, not even a glottal stop to interrupt them from flowing. But Leo continued to sit still, tongue-tied like an idiot.

“Go ahead,” the man murmured after a while.

“Excuse me?”

“You want to ask something, no?”

Once again, after years of avoiding that part of his memory, Leo had been thinking about Mogadishu. About the hard-eyed paramilitary thugs who, with professional craftsmanship, had taken his team apart. Could this guy do it? Cut someone, see them cry and beg and think of it as another day’s work? It felt so hard to believe. Would a hardened killer laugh and smile like Leo had seen this man do?

“Have you been injured many times before?” It wasn’t what Leo needed to ask, but perhaps it was a step in the right direction.

“Yes.” Again a short glance, as if the man wondered what had led Leo to the question. “I was in a bad car accident, once. The doctors, they... stitched me together from pieces. The scar on my shoulder — I was twenty. Got cocky. Bad place to be shot. Most of my scars are from knives or the like. Then, this big thing here.” He tapped at his proud Roman nose with the flashlight which he’d been using to inspect gun parts for remaining specks of fouling. “Broken four times.”

“Doesn’t show.” It didn’t. Leo was ready to swear it was the most attractively aquiline nose he’d ever seen.

“Plastic surgery. Can’t have broken nose when pretending to be idle millionaire, eh?”

“So, is it all just pretense, then? That... playboy thing?”

The man started to shrug and gave a small wince when his body remembered the pain. “No. Not all. It is still me. Just — _esagerato._ ”

Exaggerated. Right. “And which part do you prefer? That or... this?” Leo gestured toward the table and the weapons on it.

“Well, how to say it. I am a man. I like women, I like having fun. But it is difficult, sometimes, to be the only one who knows there is another world. _Hai capito?”_

Leo swallowed. There it was. The white rabbit. “What other world?”

Finally the hazel eyes turned up to really meet his own. And just like that, Leo’s breath was taken away.

 _Down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again._ It would be so easy to jump in. And Leo knew it wasn’t an outside force that tempted him to do so. It was his own mindless longing for the unknown. That same longing had taken him to Africa. More than once, it had almost killed him.

“So you decided I can stay?” the Italian asked.

Leo blinked at the unexpected question. “Well, yes. Did I have a choice?”

“There is always a choice.”

“Even with the fear of a bullet in my head?”

The man’s expression shifted to reflect horror.

“You think I would hurt you?”

Leo hid his surprise and shrugged. They shared no blood, no allegiance. _I swear on my honor as an Auditore._ How far would that crude medieval pledge go? Surely not far enough to compromise life or freedom?

Mr. Auditore shook his head.

Despite his ill appearance, his hands did not tremble as he slotted the gun parts back together. With everything assembled, he worked the action a few times and wiped away the bit of gun oil that trickled from between. Leo watched him insert a full magazine against his palm, rack the slide again and pull back the hammer, as he must have done countless times before.

Cocked and locked. Just a tiny thumb switch away from spitting death. But somehow it felt less terrifying than what Leo had expected from his first live gun since Somalia. He wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was because of the utter calm with which the Italian handled his weapon? Instead of soaking deluded confidence from it, like most gunmen Leo had ever met, he seemed to respect its menace — which in Leo’s experience was the only way to control something powerful and dangerous.

The Italian looked back up. Leo sat fixed by his gaze again.

“This was my father’s gun,” the man said. “It was with him when he died. He used it many times, but he never killed anyone who did not deserve it. And neither have I. I swear I will shoot myself before I lay a finger on you.”

Leo might have argued about the purpose of the judiciary, the shaky morals of vigilante justice, the problematics of capital punishment. But it seemed unwise, sitting across from someone in possession of a primed firearm.

“I guess it comes down to your definition of who deserves to die, then,” he said.

“How about someone who wants to enslave mankind and take away their free will?”

 _What the hell?_ But before Leo could say anything from his surprise, the door to Rosa’s room opened.

“For shit’s sake, guys. Don’t you know what time it is?”

They turned toward the grumpy voice.

In an oversized Marimekko night gown, knitted wool socks on her feet, Rosa tottered across the loft, hand mussing up short hair that already stood out in crazy spikes.

“What?” she exclaimed when she noticed their stares. “It’s five past fucking six! Haven’t you idiots heard that waking up too early makes you a fucking moron?” She went to the bathroom, muttering something about moving to Lapland.

The moment was gone. Leo drank from his glass. The Italian started putting away his tools, and Leo watched him wipe them one by one and place them in a kit. Rosa reappeared, and the coffee machine gurgled a few times. Then she went to close the window that was still letting in cold air and padded over to sit next to them with a mug in hand.

She took in the wealth of lethal items on the table with remarkable sang-froid.

“So. The annual Helsinki Gun Show takes place in our home, this year?”

What was the sentiment Leo saw in the Italian’s glance at Rosa, aside from the same wariness he’d given Leo earlier? Uncertainty? Familiarity, from having shared physical intimacy? Fear..? Rosa had loudly professed her intent to call the police on several occasions. Did the man consider her a threat? Clearly he didn’t dismiss her as someone of no consequence. But then, he hadn’t seemed to make that mistake earlier, either.

The silence stretched. Rosa sipped from her cup.

“Look,” she said, at last. “The way I figure it, we have to get along for a few weeks, whether we want to or not. Right? So, how about we start again from be beginning? Hi, I’m Rosa, a lean project management consultant. Also, an ex juvenile delinquent. Thanks for asking, it was just petty theft and joyriding and trying to escape a shitty foster family.” She pointed to Leo. “This is Leo. He’s — don’t give me that look, butthead, you can tell your own dirty secrets. He’s about as smart as five normal people put together. And a bit of a dork. He needs a stiff kick every now and then or he works himself to death. He’s also the nicest guy on earth, so if you hurt him, I’m going to make origami of your dick. Okay, I think that covers us. Your turn, mystery man.” She downed some more of the pitch-black soup in her container.

After being delivered only several moments of more awkward Finnish/Italian silence, she rolled her eyes.

“Come on. Not that I don’t enjoy just watching you sit there all pretty in that too-small shirt. But three weeks is going to be a long time to mope around. And I already know stuff about you your mom doesn’t. Might as well share the rest.”

The Italian brushed back dirty hair with his fingers, eyes downcast. Leo held his breath as emotion flitted across his weary face. Suspicion? Frustration? Resignation..? Finally a wan smile curled his mouth.

“My mother might surprise you, Rosa,” he said.

She snorted. “Oh? Go on. Share the dirt, Bruce Wayne.”

The man blew out a breath. Slowly he leaned back in his chair and spread his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“ _Va bene._ What do you guys want to know?”

o o o

“How about, who the hell are you and what are you doing here?”

They’d transferred themselves to languish on the sofas and armchairs, coffee within reach. Leo had insisted that Mr. Auditore should a) wash his hands of toxic substances, b) take his medicine and c) let him clean the gunshot wound. Fifteen minutes later, he was lying on the couch with two ice packs held to his ribs. The painkillers hadn’t yet kicked in, and he seemed grey of face and short of breath, but apparently he preferred the distraction of human interaction to merely waiting out the pain.

“Big question, _mia bella,_ ” he muttered.

“Well, you’re clearly not a banker or an exec, so we can start from there.”

“I’m a cleaner. I take out the trash.”

Rosa crossed her arms. Leo had seen the same expression on her face when someone was giving her lip in a meeting.

“Funny, loverboy. Paula did suspect you were in Finland for reasons other than the merger. It made no sense for the mothership to send someone so young and inexperienced. But I admit, our speculations landed in a whole different direction. So, congratulations. We all thought you were a prodigal son weathering out a nasty scandal in the provinces. Well played.”

“Thanks. I guess.”

“At least my part in the deception was relatively pleasant.” Not many could have told, but Leo recognized the sharp tone of her voice. She was trying very hard not to let on that she was insulted.

“Deception?” Mr. Auditore blinked, as if the idea hadn’t even occurred to him. “Rosa. You’re a lovely woman, a man does not have to pretend to like you.”

Rosa opened her mouth, then looked at Leo and seemed to reconsider. “So, you shot that Pazzi guy.”

“Yes.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“He is... was... a very bad man who had my father and brothers killed.”

Rosa’s brows lifted. Obviously she wasn’t as obsessive with Google as Leo.

“I thought they died in a car accident,” Leo said.

“Yes. One arranged by Francesco de’ Pazzi with the help of my father’s accountant, Uberto Alberti. Who is also now dead.”

“What was their motive? Or would telling that violate the _omertà_ _?”_

“ _Omertà_ _?”_ The Italian frowned. “Wait. What do you think I am?”

“Well, I doubt you’re an undercover agent.”

The man grumbled under his breath and flopped an ice pack on his forehead as if he was getting a headache.

“ _Quindi sarei un mafioso, eh? Per l’amore di..._ I told you, Leonardo, I’m one of the good guys.”

“You keep saying that. What does it mean?”

For a moment, Mr. Auditore’s mouth was set in a tight line. Then an annoyed sigh seemed to signal a decision of some sort.

“Very well. We are a Brotherhood that calls ourselves the Assassins. My father was an Assassin. So was his father before him, and my uncle, and my mother. We have waged a war against the Templar Order for thousands of years. They are the bad ones. Francesco de’ Pazzi was one of them. So was Hitler. And Stalin. And Mussolini. They own Abstergo Industries. They want total power, a new world order. We want to stop them.”

Slowly, Leo and Rosa looked at each other.

“How long have you been... an assassin?” Leo asked, then.

“I’m not in the Brotherhood yet. I have to prove myself, first.”

“And killing Francesco de’ Pazzi was that test?”

The Italian slid the ice pack from his eyes, high enough to level them a cool glance. Perhaps Leo wasn’t controlling his tone of voice as well as he thought.

“You think I’m crazy? You have seen my gear. Do you think I made it myself?”

Of course not. And then there was the matter of the security video. No one learned to fight like that from a couple of self-defence classes and a krav maga course. But two ancient brotherhoods fighting over the fate of humanity? That was a bit thick. Even if Leo had to admit that if there was something that could make even a sane person believe in conspiracy theories, it was the existence of Abstergo Industries — the shadowy multinational corporate conglomerate that was rumored to control many of the world’s most influential companies.

He should have laughed. Or cracked a joke about which side Santa Claus and his elves worked for. But he hadn’t felt much like laughing for two days, now. He had no idea what he wanted to believe — was he dealing with a madman, or was his own grip on reality somehow compromised?

In any case, if the guy was deeply delusional, it could be dangerous to mock him.

“So, assassin,” Rosa said. “Can you do handsprings, like in the movies?”

Leo looked at her in shock. She shrugged.

“A girl’s allowed to be curious, isn’t she?”

Leo floundered for words. Then he noticed that there was actually a shadow of a smile on the Italian’s face. He coughed and decided to let the matter pass.

“Well then,” he said. “Now that we know where we stand. I’d like to establish a rule. No weapons. Not on my kitchen table, not peeking out from under someone’s boxers. Keep them hidden.”

Soft Italian grumbling rose from the couch. “I need a gun. I cannot fight like this.”

“Well, put them under the bed, then. And I thought your Uncle said it’s safe?”

“It’s never safe. I cannot protect my family, but I can protect you. I will kill to do so, if I have to.”

There was nothing bloodthirsty to the way the man said it. He was stating what he believed to be true. Kill or be killed. What was it like to live in a world where anyone could be out to get you?

“I will not let anyone hurt you,” the Italian continued. “Not like...”

“Like on Thursday?” Leo finished for him, when he failed to do so.

A small nod was his only answer.

“What happened?”

The ice pack remained firmly over the man’s eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said after a moment.

So, not a brainwashed murderer, then. Leo glanced at Rosa, who shook her head at him, frowning.

“Sorry,” Leo said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“You can ask anything you want.”

There were about a thousand more questions Leo could think of — but maybe this was not the right time.

“Are the painkillers starting to work? I need to show you how to do those breathing exercises.”

“Yes.”

As Leo pushed up from the chair, he couldn’t help but to wonder how desperate someone had to be to accept even excruciating pain as a distraction from their thoughts.

o o o

“Handsprings, Rosa. Really?”

Rosa crossed her eyes at Leo from where she was putting their coffee mugs in the dishwasher. “Don’t be such a sourpuss. I’ve never met a professional killer before. And he answered, didn’t he?”

Yes. Ezio Auditore, who now slept on Leo’s couch, exhausted from having to breathe deep for five minutes, had indeed answered Rosa’s inane questions. Thanks to her, Leo knew now that aside from being beautiful and dangerous, young Mr. Auditore was also very, very bendy. He could do handsprings. And touch the back of his head with his toes. And walk a tightrope. And he could also probably kill a man with a dessert spoon, even though he’d remarked on the incredible inefficiency of using blunt utensils as weapons.

It hadn’t been all pointless. It had helped the man get through the painful exercise of forcing his mutilated rib cage to expand properly. So, in the end, Leo had been thankful for Rosa’s flippancy, at least when the Italian wasn’t in so much pain that all he could do was fight the water running from his eyes.

“You can't seriously mean that you believe him?” Leo said while stacking butter, Edam cheese, ham and cucumber slices on _Fazerin ruispuikulat._

“Frankly, I don’t know if it matters what I believe.”

“You’re taking this well.”

Rosa shrugged. “It is what it is. What’s the point of feeling sorry for myself?”

 _You’re just messed up from what you guys did before._ But Leo didn’t have the nerve to say it out loud. He knew she’d just talk right back to him. And frankly, he had to admit he didn’t know how Rosa felt about their unexpected guest, now that he’d turned out to be more than just decorative. She wasn’t always the easiest person to read, even for him.

“Does it bother you?” he asked instead. “What you guys did?”

Rosa kept stacking dirty dishes in the washer. “Why?”

“I’m just curious. Does it make you feel awkward? That you two..?”

Rosa seemed to give the question far more thought than it deserved.

“Not really,” she said then. “I know what I said back there, but he doesn’t seem callous enough to really use people. Sort of feels like it happened with someone else, you know? And it kind of did, didn’t it? Although I guess I should have been tipped off when he —”

Leo panicked. “Let’s stick to the abstract, shall we?”

When Rosa’s eyes started glinting, Leo knew that he was going to deeply regret opening his mouth. She straightened and pretended to swoon against the dishwasher.

“But Leo, he was so passionate! And athletic! And manly! And so very, very, _very_ good with his —”

Leo, who had finished making sandwiches, fumbled with nothing in particular on the counter. “Not listening, not listening... gold star gay...”

She snorted. “I can still see how you look at him, Mr. Work Makes Me Happy.”

Oh god, there went the blush again. “I — I’m just worried for his health.”

“Uh huh.”

“So how do I? Look at him, I mean,” Leo heard himself ask. He feared the answer would be somewhere along the lines of ‘besotted foolery’.

Rosa hesitated. The fact that she didn’t immediately jump on a chance to make more fun of him was far worse than mockery.

Oh, hell. What had given him away? Was it the way he’d fussed about that damn blanket? He probably shouldn’t have nagged quite so much, either, when Rosa was trying to make the guy laugh — as if he hadn’t been in enough pain already.

“Relax, I’m just taking the piss out of you,” she said. “Hey, do you think our house assassin might like Chinese? I can go grab lunch from the usual place in a couple hours.” She glanced at the microwave clock.

“Well, the drugs are messing with his stomach and appetite, but yeah, he should eat.” _And so should I_ _, for that matter_ _._ Leo’s woozy head proved that work and sleep weren’t the only things he’d neglected over the past couple of days.

“Okay, Chinese it is. Anything else?”

Leo instructed her to buy more medical supplies. She’d probably have to ransack a whole shelf in the pharmacy — but perhaps it was a bit paranoid to suspect that anyone would connect her sudden zombie apocalypse preparations with the assassination news which still occupied national headlines.

“Something easy to digest,” Leo said later, when Rosa was about to leave, his voice low so as not to disturb their guest on the couch nearby.

She mock saluted him and reached for the door. But with her hand on the lock, she hesitated.

Leo followed the direction of her eyes to the couch. The Italian was still softly snoring away his day, wrapped in that damn hand-woven design blanket which Leo had paid far too much attention to. Asleep, he looked about twenty years old.

“Leo, are you sure you’re going to be okay when I’m gone?”

“I think I can manage an hour alone with a knocked-out killer.”

“Not what I’m talking about. I can still call Paula, you know. Tell her that I won’t go to Hamburg. It’ll piss her off, but she’ll get over it. I doubt I’ll even lose my job in the next _YT-neuvottelut._ ”

There hadn’t been a single round of employee reduction negotiations at Pellervoinen ever. Even had Paula not been very careful about recruiting and company finances, that wasn’t how consulting worked. Instead of being fired through the cumbersome process Finnish union law required, bad consultants just weren’t given clients any more. After subsisting on a small base salary for a few months, even the most stubborn person usually took the hint and left.

“Absolutely not,” Leo whispered. “I’ll be fine. Go on, I need to clean up. I don’t want anyone to see that crap in the kitchen.”

But five minutes after the door closed, Leo was still standing near it, staring at the couch and the man lying on it — imagining he could see traces of the boy Mr. Auditore had been not that long ago. In a year or two, they would be gone, but now it still lingered, that touch of innocence.

 _Do you_ _think_ _he’s on the side of the angels?_ Hardly. But it was difficult to think of the guy as a monster, either.

What would it do to a person, seeing all that death and having to deal it yourself? Especially without being born to such a life like those Somali fighters? Leo hadn’t forgotten the previous day’s phone call. Somewhere across Europe, a war was being waged, one which the guy had perhaps himself set in motion — and here he was, trapped, afraid for his friends and family and unable to do anything to help them. Leo couldn’t begin to understand the killing part, but that deep helplessness was something he knew intimately. The man had to be beside himself with worry.

And Leo wasn’t even paying him the simple courtesy of addressing him by his name.

As if to test his courage, Leo said it under his breath. _Ezio._ Not that common a moniker, surely. Something about it seemed almost ancient. Not unpleasant, though... for reasons that went beyond Leo’s attraction, or his affinity for names which referenced the animal kingdom, such as his own. The syllables almost felt like a sigh in a foreign language in his mouth.

Assassins. Templars. If what the man claimed was true, it would mean Leo had truly fallen into the rabbit’s hole. But maybe he’d survive three weeks in Wonderland? He was hardly an impulsive person. He’d simply... refuse to eat from strange mushrooms or attend weird tea parties. He’d go on acting professionally, keep his distance, stay out of trouble. And what else was there to do, really? They were all adults. Not... stammering, blushing teenagers who lost their ability to cogitate in the vicinity of exceptionally well-formed strangers.

Ignoring a sarcastic little voice at the back of his head that kept jeering ‘you wish’, Leo detached himself from the wall and went to take care of the knives and pistols still lying on the dinner table, just a set of closed blinds away from being seen by curious neighbors.

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, Dragon Age Inquisition ate about a month out of my life, and after that my mood has been very low... but here you go, at last. A big thanks to my betas for being awesome -- and fast, since as usual once I got the chapter done, I couldn't stop going a little mad until it's published.

For the third day in a row, Leo woke up to the feeling that something catastrophic was about to happen.

It was a few hours since he’d registered through a sleepy haze that Rosa was heading out to the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport, looking snazzy in her business suit and Burberry trench. Now the door was opening again, and Leo’s internal clock screamed that it sure as hell wasn’t his roommate returning to get a forgotten toothbrush. Before he was even fully awake, he’d stumbled from the spare mattress he’d set up in the living room area of the loft.

“ _Hyvää huomenta!”_

After some eye-poking, Leo managed to put on his glasses and saw the tiny Filipino lady who had entered. She smiled sunnily at the sight of his startled figure. In spite of the date being late April and temperatures having reached well above ten degrees Celsius, she was wearing about the same amount of clothing as the average Finn in February.

“I’m sorry, did I wake you?” Not looking sorry at all, she started opening her parka and continued to chatter in perfect Finnish. “What a lovely day! Feels like summer right around the corner. Didn’t even need my long underpants any more.”

Maid service. Leo had entirely forgotten. How, he had no idea, since the same woman had visited almost every Monday morning at nine for the last year or so.

“Um, I, uh —”

She squinted at him. “You look awfully pale. I hope you aren’t ill? There’s a flu going around everyone’s talking about. You sit down, now, I’ll make you some tea before I start.”

She put away her coat, still fussing about his alleged illness, which in about three seconds had become certified fact. Leo glanced toward his room. His imagination had started to provide less than comforting visions of a drugged Italian hitman waking up to the prattle and making snap judgments. Possibly ones that involved the pistols and knives stashed under Leo’s bed.

He tried for a laugh. It came out sounding not very natural at all.

“Oh, my! I totally forgot. I was supposed to call you and tell you that we won’t need you today.”

“Well, now that I’m already here...” She bent down to pull open the velcro on her winter boots.

“No, no. I will tip you of course, for your trouble.”

“It’s no trouble at all.”

“But it’s not even that messy around here.”

She straightened and took in the surrounding space — the empty Chinese food cartons, clothes, papers and magazines, Leo’s makeshift bed near the tv, and the dust gathering on everything in the spring light that filtered in through the curtains.

“Really?” She looked dubious.

Leo snatched his wallet from a table and herded her back toward the door, coat and all.

“Please, I insist. Take the time off. Here, buy yourself something nice. Goodbye.” He shoved about fifty euros in her hand, pushed her outside and closed the door before she had a chance to say anything else. Then he moaned wordlessly and slumped against the door.

Three weeks of this left? He’d develop a heart condition, which at his age would be an achievement.

Gradually he grew aware of not being alone and turned to look toward his bedroom, straightening self-consciously.

_Oh, hell. What does he have against shirts?_

“Well, that was not suspicious.” Ezio was leaning hunched against the door frame, clothed in a snug pair of sweatpants, his gold cross and about five days’ worth of virile facial hair growth. He looked exhausted. Perhaps he hadn’t been sleeping well? With the amount of pain he still had to be in, that wouldn’t have been a surprise. Leo could only hope that he was at least taking his medication as instructed.

The evil black bruises that reached from mid-sternum to navel had a sobering effect on the man’s mind-boggling physique. Leo didn’t even think he was in danger of embarrassing himself. Much.

“Who was it? Your girlfriend?” Ezio prodded. Leo realized that since he didn’t speak Finnish, he really had no idea.

“The cleaning lady,” he muttered. “I forgot. I — I don’t think she saw anything.”

Ezio frowned. “You look scared. Why?”

“Scared?” Leo fidgeted. “I’m not scared.”

“I don’t kill everything that moves, Leonardo.”

Leo barked out a laugh. “Of course not!”

Ezio continued to appear vaguely insulted, and Leo had to admit that it wasn’t without reason. The guy could hardly be the sort of idiot who would launch into a murderous rampage to silence a random eyewitness. Insane, perhaps. But while a hitman could probably survive without intelligence of the academic sort, the job had to require a lot of thinking on one’s feet.

Leo sighed. “I’m sorry. We should decide on some kind of protocol for situations like this.”

Ezio’s indignation deflated a little. “You get many surprise guests?”

“Not every day, no.”

“Well, then it can wait until breakfast.” Ezio started toward the bathroom.

The way the man moved was still far from his earlier grace, but Leo was just amazed that he could walk at all. He was relatively certain that, in the same situation, he would have been pissing in a bottle for about a week.

Before Ezio had taken more than a few steps, however, the doorbell rang.

 _What the hell?_ Leo looked around. But he couldn’t see anything he didn’t recognize, so it most likely wasn’t the cleaning lady coming to get something she’d left behind.

“Another girlfriend?” The Italian had stopped in the middle of the floor, one dark brow raised.

“Er...”

The doorbell rang again.

“I guess I should take a look,” Leo said weakly.

Ezio gestured for him to go ahead.

“Um,” Leo said after peering through the peephole. “I think this looks more like one of _your_ girlfriends.”

“Eh?” Ezio stepped forward, and Leo moved aside to give him a turn at the fisheye lense.

“ _Non ci credo,”_ the guy muttered.

“You know her?”

“Yes.” To Leo’s shock, Ezio straightened and opened the door.

The smell of expensive perfume invaded the loft like a chemical weapon.

“Cristina,” Ezio growled at the young woman who stood in the corridor.

She stared at his half-naked form in obvious surprise, eyes hidden behind a pair of huge designer sunglasses. She was absolutely stunning — sexy waves of blond hair, slender curves in a cream white coat and maroon leather boots, golden jewelry, a Fendi purse clutched in a slim hand. In her heels, she was about the same height as Ezio.

“ _Biscottino!”_ She pushed the shades back from a startling pair of chocolate-brown eyes, stepped in and kissed Ezio on the mouth. The guy mumbled in surprise and went still.

Leo blinked.

The kiss lasted for quite a while and before the end, Leo was almost certain that it had become to involve tongue. He wasn’t entirely sure Ezio looked happy about the passionate assault, but he wasn’t resisting, either.

“ _Povero bambino!”_ Finally, the woman withdrew a couple of inches. Her carefully manicured nails stroked Ezio’s neck under his overgrown dark hair. She batted her long lashes and continued to lisp Italian at him in a pitying tone. _“Did you miss me?”_

“Uh. Cristina —”

“ _Shush. I came as soon as I_ _heard_ _.”_

Leo swatted aside a senseless twinge of jealousy.

Of course a guy like that had a girlfriend or three. And of course they were all just as intensely gorgeous as him. The only question that remained was, what the heck had brought this lovebird here so quickly.

The woman maneuvered herself inside and closed the door. Ezio winced.

“ _Careful..!”_

“ _Mario told me everything. I can’t believe you went and almost had yourself killed again, naughty boy.”_ She ran her gaze all over his mauled body and sighed in pity. _“Sugar, you_ _look_ _terrible! What did those horrid men do to you? What were you thinking?”_

“Cristina —”

She tickled his scruffy chin. _“If you ever do that again, I swear I will —”_

“ _Cristina!_ _He knows_ _!”_

She froze.

After a moment, her eyes turned to Leo. The pretense of ditzy adoration fell from her as if it had never existed.

“ _What did you say?”_ She looked back to Ezio. Her voice sounded completely different from before — low and threatening.

“ _He knows_ _. I told him.”_

For a second more she stared. Then, cursing under her breath, she shoved him aside and walked further into the loft.

“ _What exactly did you tell him, Ezio?”_ She turned to level him a stare, hands on her hips. Leo couldn’t help but notice the way she moved, absolutely poised on her stiletto heels. He’d seen the same animal grace before — in a security video where five men had been injured, one of them fatally.

“ _Everything,”_ he gasped, still trying to recover from being manhandled.

She gestured near her face. _“Are you out of your_ _fucking_ _mind?!”_

“ _They are in danger, I had to tell them.”_

“ _Them?!”_

“ _He has a roommate.”_

She gaped. _“Oh my_ _fucking_ _God._ _I knew_ _it._ _I knew_ _you are an idiot. You irresponsible, impulsive —”_

Ezio didn’t look too good at all. _“Nice to see you too, Cristina. Love the wig.”_

“ _Shut the fuck up! I swear I will_ _kill_ _you myself!”_ She started digging in her purse. Leo’s heart nearly stopped. But it was merely to pull out a phone in a white leather case.

“ _Don’t.”_ Faster than seemed possible in his condition, Ezio was at her and wrapped his fingers around her wrist.

If looks could kill, he would have been dead on the spot.

“ _You dare to touch me?”_ She yanked her arm free.

Suddenly Leo found himself in the presence of two pissed-off, loud Italians gesturing at each other.

“ _You_ _just_ _had your tongue down my throat, Cristina!”_

“ _Don’t remind me. This disguise was not my idea. I think I have to wash my mouth with lye!”_

“ _Don’t you even want to_ _hear_ _my reasons?”_

“ _What for?”_ She gave him a scathing once-over. _“It’ll_ _just_ _be the same bullshit as always. Some crap about how you had no choice or whatever. I don’t care. I wasn’t prepped for this. I need to call Mario.”_

“ _Still the same_ _sweet_ _Cristina.”_

“ _You thought me_ _sweet_ _enough when you_ _screwed me_ _and_ _screwed me_ _over, you pig!”_

“ _Did Uncle mention that mister Valta speaks Italian?”_

Evidently, no, based on how Cristina’s eyes pierced Leo in annoyed outrage. In lieu of being able to disappear under the floor, Leo straightened like a schoolboy.

Who was she? The mad hatter? Or the queen who would both cry for Leo’s head and strike it off his shoulders herself? Absurdly, Leo felt mortified about his appearance. If he had to die, he’d rather have done it wearing something slightly more presentable than a t-shirt and pajama pants.

But whoever this Cristina was, she didn’t pull a gun on him, or even snap his neck or break his spleen with a neat karate kick. After a moment, she walked over to him and extended a slender hand.

“I apologize,” she said in English, her tone now more polite, if terse. Her accent was barely noticeable, much less obvious than Ezio’s. “My name is Cristina Vespucci.”

When Leo shook her hand, he sensed a steely strength in it. “Leo Valta,” he said, feeling rather surreal.

“A pleasure. What did the initiate tell you?”

Leo had to force the words out of his dry throat. “Assassins. Templars. Francesco de’ Pazzi.”

“I see.” She threw a look over her shoulder to where Ezio was shuffling toward the nearest chair, a hand on his midriff. “The initiate should have kept his mouth shut. This complicates things.”

“Initiate, eh?” Ezio sat down, wincing. “You were made, what? Four months ago, Cristina?”

She ignored him. “Is he badly wounded?” she asked from Leo.

Leo recounted Ezio’s injuries. It didn’t escape him that two people had now relied on him to describe them instead of inquiring after the matter from the source. As he spoke, a frown appeared between Cristina’s elegantly arching brows.

“I see,” she said. “I was merely told that he was injured.”

“You just didn’t care,” Ezio rasped from where he was sitting, still looking rather pale.

“I assumed I would be briefed on everything I need to know.”

“ _Uffa. I think I can_ _still_ _taste_ _machine oil,”_ Ezio muttered in Italian.

Cristina smiled at Leo. The expression didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“Mister Valta, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I’d like to speak with the initiate in private.”

Ezio waved his hands in alarm behind Cristina’s back. But if this woman had told Leo to jump out of a window, he would probably have asked which one. “Of course,” he said.

For the next fifteen minutes or so, he paced back and forth in his room and tried to ignore both a growing pressure in his bladder and the whispers coming from behind the door. True privacy was hard to come by in his apartment. The most he could offer was the semblance.

“ _Your Uncle should never have given you the_ _job_ _!”_ Cristina was saying. _“You’re unpredictable, unreliable, arrogant —”_

Ezio’s reply was low enough that Leo couldn’t make out more than a few words.

“ _I was sent here to assess the damage you’ve done,”_ Cristina continued. _“I intend to do my duty and do it well, unlike some others —”_

The volume of the discussion lowered again. Leo went to the bed, took a tablet from the nightstand and typed in ‘Cristina Vespucci’.

To his surprise, she wasn’t a fashion model. Apparently she was the daughter of a well-known Tuscan statesman and a student of political science. Not that the internet wasn’t full of photoshoots of her, mostly as a leggy, classy brunette of one European shade or another. Shouldn’t a guy like Ezio have been head over heels for such a woman? The animosity between the two had seemed almost... familial.

Then it hit Leo. He sat on the bed and tried to control a sudden spell of dizziness.

Until now he’d been borderline able to brush everything away as a strange joke or the ramblings of a madman. Cristina’s appearance changed everything. While shared delusions were possible, even Leo’s skepticism had its limits. It was true. He really lived in a world where the fate of nations was balanced on a secret war between ancient shadow organizations. Who knew... maybe he should start wearing a tinfoil hat, just in case? He suppressed a manic giggle.

Gradually the voices from behind the door became louder again.

“ _I still can’t believe you told everything to people you_ _just_ _met —”_

“ _I made inquiries, Cristina. And he saved my life,_ _I trust_ _him a lot more than_ _I trust_ _some of Uncle’s men.”_

Inquiries? What kind of inquiries? Leo’s foolish pleasure at hearing he was trusted was tinged with alarm. He had a little more to dig up than most. His choice of bed partners was only the tip of the iceberg.

“ _You swore an oath!”_ Cristina almost howled.

“ _Which has been broken a thousand times before!”_

“ _For_ _a reason_ _!”_

“ _I had_ _a reason_ _!”_

“ _Brain damage is what you have!”_

By now, no one was keeping their voice down. Ezio’s sounded thin and tight, as if he was trying to yell through pain and gritted teeth.

“ _What should I_ _have said_ _? That I’m a criminal? That they can’t trust me not to shoot them in their sleep?”_

“ _Yes,_ _God_ _forbid that there should be an option between that and blathering absolutely everything, putting in danger the Brotherhood you swore to protect. You could have told you’re from_ _Interpol_ _. Or the secret police. Anything. Make things up, for fuck’s sake, it’s part of your job description! You’re not a complete idiot, are you? Even though I sometimes wonder. Mother of_ _God_ _.”_

“ _Interpol_ _? With what was all over the evening news here? I don’t think they’re stupid.”_

“ _You can’t_ _just_ _go and compromise your_ _identity_ _—”_

“ _My_ _identity_ _is already compromised!”_ Ezio exploded. _“_ _Everyone_ _who matters knows!_ _Everyone_ _! I fucked up, Cristina. My whole team is dead. I will not let anyone else die because of me!”_

Silence fell. Leo waited with baited breath.

“ _So. You’ve_ _finally_ _learned to admit when you might have made a mistake,”_ Cristina said then, slightly more amenable.

“ _Yes!”_ Ezio wheezed. _“Damn you. Can we stop yelling now? It hurts.”_

The voices became closer to whispers again, to the point that Leo couldn’t hear what was being said.

Eventually, he simply had to use the bathroom.

Coming out, he saw Cristina stand up from an armchair. She’d removed her coat. Beneath it, wrapped in a simple, sleeveless cream white vest and narrow trousers made of some movement-friendly fabric, she was built like a competitive swimmer.

“A word, if you may,” she said to Leo.

Leo spared a look at the couch and the man lying on it. Not much was happening there. Most likely exhaustion and drugs had taken their toll. He headed to the kitchen, and Cristina followed him there and settled to lean against the bar table while he started making coffee.

“He told me he was tired,” she said. “Then he just fell asleep. Isn’t that alarming?”

Excessive somnolence could be caused by things like brain damage or kidney failure. But by now, Leo had come to the conclusion that the cause was more benign.

“He’s taking very strong medicine,” he said while reaching for milk from the fridge. “Emotions can be tiring. And I get the feeling you two share a lot of them.”

“Oh, so you noticed that he hates me.” The humor in Cristina’s voice was so dry, it practically creaked.

Leo was curious, but prying would have been rude. Wouldn’t it?

“Why?”

She hesitated. “Let’s just say that he’s proud and old-fashioned and doesn’t like losing, least of all to a woman.”

“I see.” So, she was positing the whole thing as a matter of one-upmanship between two colleagues. That could hardly be the entire truth, but Leo suspected he’d waste his time expecting more from her. He hit the button on the coffee machine, making discussion impossible for a second.

Old-fashioned, huh? Just how old-fashioned? Enough to feel disgusted that his doctor was a flaming, unrepentant homosexual? Then again, if the guy really had made ‘inquiries’, he had to know already. Yet he’d never once joked about the thing, or even hinted at it in any way... did that mean he didn’t care? That he was too well mannered to bring up the topic? Or was he just too sick to give a damn?

The machine did its job. Cristina accepted a cup and for a while, they sipped from their cappuccinos in silence. Outside, a tram rattled down Tehtaankatu, its sound so familiar that Leo only noticed because the assassin’s presence made him hyper-aware of his surroundings.

“So, you’re a doctor?” Cristina asked.

“No, just a licentiate. But I have some practical experience.”

She looked him up and down. Leo was glad he’d bothered to tidy up in the bathroom, even if his clothes were nothing to write home about.

“This is a nice apartment.” Her eyes flickered toward the expensive coffee machine. “What business are you in?”

Obediently, Leo explained about his job. She listened attentively and offered a few questions that showed she actually understood some of what he was saying. However, Leo got the impression she wasn’t really interested in his line of work, rather than how he spoke about it.

“Mario and Ezio are placing a great deal of trust in you,” she said.

“I take it that you don’t share that trust?”

“Why should I trust anyone so easily?”

“Indeed, it seems to me that you don’t extend that feeling even to your colleagues.”

Leo nearly bit his tongue. It probably wasn’t the brightest idea to start challenging her. But Cristina rewarded his straightforwardness with a tight-lipped smile.

“There’s a reason Ezio hasn’t been made, yet, you know. He’s impulsive. He operates on instinct more than anything.”

 _Why is she telling me this?_ “If he’s that unpredictable, why does this Mario keep him around?”

“Three reasons. One, Ezio is very good at what he does. Two, he’s more dedicated to the cause than anyone. And three, so far his instinct has never been wrong.” Cristina tilted her head. “May I ask, what did you think when he first told you?”

“That he was crazy?”

Her smile grew infinitesimally warmer, as if she approved of his reaction. “You’ve since changed your mind, I suppose?”

Leo smiled back wanly. He realized he hadn’t smiled a whole lot since Thursday, except perhaps in self defense. “Facts seem to point in his favor. I have to admit that I’m still in a bit of a shock.”

“It doesn’t show.” She frowned. “In fact, I can hardly read you at all. You are very good at controlling yourself.”

Leo felt surprise. People rarely accused him of not showing emotion. Although that wasn’t strictly speaking what she’d said, was it?

“It’s just... the way people are around here,” he said. “We tend to keep our thoughts to ourselves.”

“Hm.” She didn’t seem convinced. “I suppose I’ll have to trust Mario’s judgment, since I don’t have time to triangulate your mental landscape.”

Oh, dear. She’d need about a year of spare time and two to three university degrees to pull _that_ off. “You’re not going to stay around?”

She placed her empty cup on the counter. “No, I’m flying back in a few hours.”

“To the war?” Leo blurted.

Her brown eyes narrowed. “So, he told you about that, as well.”

“He had to explain why he needs to stay.” Leo tried to keep from fidgeting. “Are we in a lot of danger? Me and my roommate, I mean. She’s gone on a business trip,” he hurried to clarify when he saw the question in Cristina’s eyes.

“Ah. Well. We do not know of any enemy operatives in the city. The situation may change, but we’ll keep you informed. For now, you should try to act normal. The Pazzi will send people looking for trails once they notice that Ezio has gone missing. If you were seen with him at any point, they will find out. So, you should go to work, take your girlfriend out to dinner... whatever it is that you normally do. Avoid behaving out of the ordinary.”

 _Such as_ _canceling_ _all my meetings and disappearing from the world for days on end._ _Right_ _._ “Very well,” Leo said, even though the mere thought of trying to maintain a facade of normalcy exhausted him.

“Most importantly, stay alert and keep away from places where you are completely alone.”

A chill ran down Leo’s spine. “Uh, so. Are you going to tell that Uncle of his that I know?”

“I can’t promise that I won’t.”

“Do you think he’ll be very upset?”

She gave him another wry smile. “Meaning, should you start running for the hills now? Mario won’t like it, but for what it’s worth, he trusts Ezio’s judgment far more than I do.”

It wasn’t a no, but it would have to do. “I see.”

“I should leave. Is there anything you wish to ask before I go?”

“About a million things,” Leo muttered. “But I doubt they’re the kind of questions you would answer.”

“You could try Ezio,” Cristina said in a sarcastic tone. “He seems to be feeling chatty. Oh, and speaking of that. Keep an eye on him. He’s an adrenaline junkie and easily bored. And when he’s bored, things tend to happen.”

“Um. What kind of things?”

“You’ll find out.”

Not long after her ominous prediction, Cristina had donned her coat and Fendi purse. She looked a bit unreal standing there in the middle of Leo’s apartment, like a vision straight out of a Fellini movie with her blond hair and bambi eyes.

“ _I’m going,”_ she announced toward the couch. _“Try to stay in one piece, asshole.”_

From under a blanket, Ezio muttered something equally affectionate.

“Good luck, mister Valta.” She nodded to Leo and slipped on her sunglasses. “You’re going to need it.”

And with that, she headed out the door, leaving behind the scent of her perfume and about twenty thousand euros in cash on the coffee table.

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about not being able to update more often. Reasons include struggling with the worst depressive episode in years and the fact that the story is in a difficult phase -- the dreaded middle, to be exact.
> 
> Once again I want to thank Alessariel and EasternViolet for beta reading, and Loki for kindly checking my Italian.

Wednesday evening, Rosa made a video call to Leo from her hotel room. She was just removing her business jacket when the connection went live. She’d combed back her short black hair in a conservative fashion, and despite her careful makeup and the terrible quality of the video, Leo could tell that she was exhausted.

“You sure the line is safe now?” she asked before he could get a ‘hey’ in sideways.

After reviewing the long list of privacy issues that plagued public chat services, Leo had decided to hack something together and install it on a rented server. What with Rosa’s hectic schedule, it had taken two days to set everything up.

“Well,” he said, “it’s not quantum encrypted, so maybe with some differential cryptanalysis and a supercomputer...”

Rosa squinted at him. “I assume that the piece of software I’m now running explains why my Mac behaves like a ninety-year-old on speed?”

“Umm, yes. I didn’t have time to run a lot of tests.”

Rosa raised her hands. “Hey, don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not complaining. I can’t believe you pulled an all-night hackathon just so we can yak shit.”

“Well, it’s not like I’ve been able to sleep much anyway.” Leo shook his head. “Although I’m not entirely sure why I bothered. Really, all they have to do is come over and threaten to beat me up and I’ll tell them everything. I’m not designed to withstand physical abuse.”

“Is anyone designed to ‘withstand physical abuse?’”

“The individual lying on my couch comes to mind.”

“Ah. Yeah.” A little smile twisted Rosa’s mouth. “Definitely looks like he can take a little punishment, doesn’t he?”

Leo resisted the urge to look over his shoulder from where he was sitting at the dinner table, to where the individual in question resided in front of the tv, still recuperating from his latest bout of punishment.

“How’s Hamburg?” he asked.

“Good beer, bad weather. Who the fuck cares? I just wanted to see you when you try to lie to me that you’re fine and that nothing weird has happened.”

“I’m fine and — oh, for heaven’s sake.” Leo crossed his arms as Rosa leaned toward the screen as if to peer at him more closely.

“The truth, now.”

Leo explained about Cristina Vespucci’s visit the day before.

A deep frown appeared on Rosa’s face. Also, her hair soon started to look much closer to its usual messy state.

“So,” she said after he’d described Cristina’s unexpected appearance, her row with Ezio, the most important parts of what she’d said about laying low and acting normal, and her eventual departure. “Red pill, huh? I’m very disappointed in my lack of sudden Kung Fu skills.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about Lewis Carroll.”

Rosa snorted.

For a moment, they indulged in mutual, silent disbelief.

Then Rosa sighed and started pulling off her earrings and watch.

“How’s Bat Boy doing?”

This time, Leo did glance to where his patient was lying on a couch — a position in which he’d spent most of the past two or three days. Ezio was technically within hearing distance, but Leo was fairly certain he didn’t understand enough Finnish to follow the discussion.

“I subscribed to some sports channels and now he mostly sleeps in front of Eurosport.”

“How positively heterosexual. Don’t you feel threatened?”

“Not half as much since I went and bought him some clothes.”

“Aw.” Rosa assumed a sad expression. “Did you have to? One good thing about this mess, and you ruined it.”

“Sorry. Maybe he’ll take them off again if you ask nicely. He’s done it before.”

“Hmph.” She pouted.” I suppose seeing a nice suit when I return is too much to ask for?”

“Just baggy sweat pants and t-shirts, I’m afraid.”

“You’re no fun at all. Truth be told, I’m surprised you had the guts to go out.”

It _had_ been unexpectedly difficult, even though Leo was by now relatively certain that Ezio wouldn’t drop dead if he turned his back. But what had really made shopping into a challenge was the fact that he had no idea what the man’s clothing size was. Apparently, in Florence, a team of stylists and a tailor were responsible for his appearance. It had to make sense for several very good reasons — but even so, Leo was floored by the idea that a whole group of people had created the seemingly effortless sex appeal which had at their first meeting nearly swept him (and a whole cocktail bar’s worth of people) off his feet. More than anything, it brought home how little he knew about Ezio.

“I’m worried about the sales guy,” Leo said. “He recognized me.”

“Everyone recognizes you, Leo. You’re easy to recognize. Why’s that a problem in this case?”

“Well, I might have told him a fiction about buying clothes for a friend. And he might have gotten this look on his face.”

“Oh. _That_ look.” Rosa assumed a dramatic tone. “‘ _Leo Valta spotted shopping clothes for an athletic John Doe. Who’s the mystery sweetheart? Doctors need sweet lovin’, too!’_ ”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

Rosa shook her head. “Fucking _Seiska.”_

Leo didn’t bother pointing out that, more often than not, Rosa treated it with merciless hilarity whenever he ended up in gossip magazines.

“I wouldn’t worry too much, though,” Rosa said. “It’s a long leap from ‘buying clothes for a friend’ to ‘hiding a dangerous assassin’, don’t you think?”

“I suppose. It worries me that I can no longer make the distinction between paranoia and reasonable caution. This is... very stressful. And not the kind of stress I do very well with, either.”

“Hey, I’m juggling fucking _hedge fund managers_ here. Living with a gorgeous, occasionally semi-naked hunk is _not_ a problem.”

“Perhaps not, until it comes with the threat of sudden death.”

Rosa snorted. “Oh? I’ve seen you kick some rather attractive people out of your life just so you can _work_ more. But I guess having Mr. Handsprings around au naturel could make it harder to notice if ninjas are trying to kill you. Even if he is a bit dirty and smelly.”

“Not any more.” Leo brightened nonsensically. “He took a shower today.”

“You sound impressed?”

“Well, I suspect that if someone shot me point blank with a handgun, I’d be horizontal and urinating blood for at least a week.”

Rosa lifted an eyebrow. “Did you help him?”

“I taped some cling wrap on his arm and gave him a towel and told him to sit down every time he started feeling faint. I think he spent an hour in the bathroom and... why are you looking at me like that?”

“Mm-hmm.” Again that crooked smile. “An hour in the bathroom. All naked and hot and wet.”

“Oh.” Leo felt his face grow warmer.

“Don’t tell me you weren’t thinking about it.”

“Please, Rosa, do restrain your imagination.” Leo adjusted his glasses. “I’m sure he spent most of the time sitting on the toilet trying not to pass out. Aside from which, that bathroom is _still_ ruined for me after what you guys did there.”

“Uh huh. I can see you blushing, you know. I bet you were thinking about that hot, soapy body. With your dick. I’m right, aren’t I? I’m always right about these things.”

Rosa’s teasing hit far too close to truth. There _had_ been uncomfortable physical awareness involved. And it had not lessened when Ezio had finally appeared from the bathroom, pale and worn out, but also nice-smelling and shaved and clearly happier with his physical condition, even if he was still incapable of doing much.

Leo rubbed at his eyes beneath his glasses. “Can we talk about something else? Please? I’m trying to maintain a professional atmosphere over here.”

“Sure, dear _pullamössö_. How are you holding up?”

“Better than I expected. Trying to work. Not making a whole lot of progress, but if the world doesn’t come to an end, I’m certain I’ll be very sorry that I acted as if it would.”

“Any sign of the old monster making a comeback? You know, the one in your head?”

“No. I’m fine. Frankly, I’m more worried about _him_ , right now.”

“Why?”

“Well, he’s — different. Withdrawn. I’d go as far as use the word ‘reticent’. And I don’t think it’s just the pain. Opiates tend to have a depressive effect on one’s mood, but I’m starting to think it’s not just that, either.”

“He hasn’t told you what happened last Thursday, yet?”

 _My whole team is dead. I will not let anyone else die because of me._ The words Leo had heard through the door when Ezio and Cristina yelled at each other were still his only clue to the yet undisclosed key events of the day when Ezio had returned to his and Rosa’s life.

“No. But I suspect that he blames himself for what happened to his team.”

“I see.” Rosa fidgeted. Leo could tell that she wanted to say something, but was trying to hold back.

He sighed. “Go on.”

“Well, someone dies. And then someone blames himself for it. And there’s survivor’s guilt and maybe a little PTSD to fuck it all up the rest of the way... now correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I’ve heard this story before?”

“You’re thinking of Mogadishu.”

“Of course I’m thinking of fucking Mogadishu! And if you haven’t been thinking about it, I’m going to lower my estimate about your IQ by about half. Which probably still leaves you with half again mine, but... oh well.”

“I do admit that our experiences hold superficial similarities. I fail to see how that makes any difference.”

“I bet my ass you’re doing your usual ‘he’s keeping to himself, so I’m going to give him about a kilometer’s worth of space just so I don’t annoy him’ routine. Am I right?”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Leo said, a bit more terse than intended.

“How about just a friend, then?”

“Rosa, please don’t take this the wrong way, but weren’t you the one who wanted to call the police? Now you want me to jump head first into Stockholm syndrome?”

“No! But sympathy might be a good idea if you want to make sure he feels inclined to help us when shit hits the fan.”

“How delightfully callous.”

“I’m not. I do sympathize. He’s just a guy.”

“The boy who shot Édouard was just a guy, too.” Ten years, and he still felt sick to his stomach when he mentioned the thing.

Rosa blew out a breath. “Can’t argue with that. But... well, I don’t get any evil vibes from him, you know? Frankly, I’m amazed loverboy ended up in the stiff making business. He squealed like a twelve-year-old when I showed him a funny kitten video at the office. I’m pretty sure bad guys don’t squeal.”

“They say Carlos the Jackal is quite charming, too.”

“When did _you_ become the suspicious one..?” Rosa mussed up her hair further. “Know what? On second thought, I take it all back. Keep your distance. Preferably, lock yourself in the toilet until I return? That way, I don’t have to worry what the hell’s going on up there.”

“Thanks for the advice, Dr. Jekyll,” Leo said, smiling despite himself.

“Oh, go fuck yourself.” Rosa huffed. “Have you been eating and sleeping?”

“Have you?”

“Noticed the massive bags under my eyes? It’s been the devil’s own circus over here. The client thought it would be a good idea to invite prospects from two firms and let us have at each other. I’m talking Americans, Leo. Those bitches fight fucking dirty. Please don’t ask me more. I’m alright, it’s just a bit much right now.”

“I’m sure you’ll do an absolutely fantastic job even if you don’t kill yourself.”

Rosa opened her mouth to say something — possibly something about how little Leo could afford to tell anyone to take it easy. But then she just sighed and smiled. “Thanks. I’ll be fine. I might actually enjoy the fight, if I wasn’t so worried what’s happening there.”

“Nothing is happening. Except for the noise pollution from UEFA Champion’s League and GP... whatever. At this exact moment, I’m more terrified of the fact that I have a meeting tomorrow than of any underworld war.”

“Well, that fantastic job thing goes both ways, you know. I’ll be back Friday after work if nothing goes —” Rosa covered a huge yawn with her hand. “Shit. Sorry. Fucking brokers. I need a very long, very hot shower before I crash for nine hours.”

“Call me tomorrow if you can?”

“Of course. Pat the assassin on the butt for me.”

“You think a little sexual harassment would help with that sympathy thing?”

Rosa rolled her eyes. “Who’s to say he won’t like it? He strikes me as the type who will soak up compliments no matter where they come from and how inappropriate.”

“I’d prefer to keep him in ignorance about my preferences.”

“Why?” Rosa appeared genuinely bewildered.

“Because he comes from a culture more traditional than ours and it would be incredibly awkward to try to avoid each other within hundred and thirty square meters of barely divided living space?”

“Fair enough... but what makes you think he doesn’t already know?”

Leo’s heart skipped. “You haven’t told him, have you?”

Rosa looked appalled at the suggestion she might have outed Leo behind his back. “No! All I’m saying is, you’re not exactly in the closet. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out.”

“I believe I would know it if he knew.” Leo was aware of the limited usefulness of intuition, but in this particular matter it had always served him well. Even if it went against what he’d heard Ezio say about ‘making inquiries’.

“Is this some anti-gay radar I haven’t heard of? I thought you’re a bit braver than that, Leo.”

“I’ve been out since primary school, please refrain from lecturing me on cowardice.”

Rosa looked taken aback at his tone. “Sorry. I was just joking.”

Leo’s tiny flare of indignation dwindled. “No, I’m sorry. I really appreciate this talk. I’d lose my mind if I had to go through this alone.”

“Right back at you.”

After the call, Leo knew he should have started on the last-minute preparations for his meeting. Instead, he just watched the first blue tinge of evening begin in the shadows.

Finally he got up and went to the living room.

On the largest sofa, Ezio seemed fast asleep, his figure enveloped in an oversized t-shirt, sweatpants and hoodie which Leo had dragged home from his trip outside the day before. The TV was emitting a constant flow of low noise, with overpowered vehicles chasing each other on the screen, and men who knew far too much about them talking over the sound of engines.

 _Positively heterosexual_ indeed. For some reason, though, the noise pollution irritated Leo far less than he’d expected.

Or, well. Not just for _some_ reason. There was dopamine involved... and noradrenaline... and perhaps even some oxytocin, although Leo’s predicament had so far been lacking in the reward section.

Just as he’d almost managed to convince himself to leave, the Italian opened his eyes.

 _“Dottore.”_ He rubbed at his face, still smooth just hours after shaving away almost a week’s worth of scruff. _“Come va?”_

_Oh... just standing here, watching you sleep like some creeper._

“Well, I was just thinking — I mean —” _Good god, you old puff, put yourself together._ “Would you like something to eat?”

Ezio appeared less than enthused. “I suppose I should?”

“I do recommend it.”

Ezio sighed a little and started pushing himself into a sitting position. By now well aware that an offer of help would have been politely refused, Leo went to prepare supper.

They ate in silence, neither of them particularly hungry — Leo due to nerves, Ezio struggling his opiate-nauseated way through a couple of Weetabix with milk and strawberry preserve, an apple and some yogurt. Well-mannered, but distant and silent. No change there, not after Cristina’s visit.

Leo couldn’t help wondering if Rosa was right. What if he _was_ being overly cautious? Perhaps trying to sympathize a bit more aggressively would have been beneficial. But he failed to perceive a single hint of invitation to do so in the Italian’s weary face or the inconsequentialities they exchanged. Ezio was keeping him at an arm’s length, and he had no idea why, or how to change it — or even if he should, all things considered.

After eating, Ezio rolled up his t-shirt sleeve for Leo to once again check and clean the gunshot wound. By now, it was showing definite signs of healing.

“You can start doing this yourself from now on,” Leo said as he examined the infinitesimally less gaping hole in Ezio’s arm.

For the first time in a while, the man really looked at him, and frowned. “Why?”

It wasn’t at all the reaction Leo had expected. “Well, uh... it looks much better already. I thought you’d be relieved to hear that you no longer need help?”

Ezio glanced at his mauled limb with distaste. “This may surprise you, but I am not fond of wounds. Of course, if you do not want to do it anymore, _dottore..._ I suppose it is kind of disgusting.”

“Heavens! Believe me, I’ve seen worse. Naturally I can continue to perform the task. If... if you don’t mind?” Leo barely had the courage to look up and meet Ezio’s eyes.

Ezio shrugged his opposite shoulder. “Why would I mind?”

Leo couldn’t help searching in those light-brown eyes for a second. But if there was anything in them except guarded curiosity, he couldn’t find it. Ezio seemed perfectly at ease at the receiving side of his attentions. Surely someone ‘proud’ and ‘old-fashioned’ — words used by Cristina to describe her colleague — wouldn’t have accepted things so casually, knowing that his caretaker might be..?

_Does he know?_

For a brave moment, Leo considered simply asking. But even if he figured out a way to do so without accidentally outing himself... was drawing attention to his past really a great idea? Better to just keep his mouth shut and save what dignity he possessed. He taped gauze over the wound and wrapped bandaging on top. With the medical necessities taken care of, Ezio returned to the sofa. After composing himself to the extent he could, Leo finally made a halfway successful attempt at preparing for his meeting.

o o o

About seventy-five minutes before the appointed time next morning, Leo was just trying to decide on a suitable level of flamboyance when the intercom buzzed.

He considered ignoring it. But there _were_ people in the world he actually cared about who weren’t in the habit of calling ahead to make sure he was home and in a receptive enough mood for a visit.

When he got out of his room, he almost walked straight into a rather woozy looking Italian. Ezio swayed, and Leo reached out to steady him.

 _“Maremma,”_ Ezio muttered.

Leo withdrew his hands. “Oh dear. I’m sorry..!”

The shorter man gave him a perplexed look. “Eh? I was only —”

The intercom buzzed again, longer this time.

“Should I hide?” Ezio asked mildly when it stopped.

“What? Yes! Of course. Sorry.” Leo stepped out of the way, and the Italian disappeared from sight.

 _Well_ _, that went smoothly._ Leo continued to the intercom and picked it up.

 _“Hei?_ Who’s there?” he asked in Finnish.

 _“Oh, you_ are _home, baby,”_ an sonorous male replied in a rolling Tampere accent. _“I was just starting to —”_

Leo slammed the receiver back in place.

In a couple seconds, the buzzing started again. Leo entertained the thought of calling the police. Then he picked up the receiver again.

“Whatever it is, Olavi, I have not the slightest wish to hear,” he said.

_“Don’t be like that, sweet buns, I’m in a fix. I need to board a plane to London in little over two hours and my plans for Kekkonen fell through. Care to let me in?”_

“No.”

_“What if I ask very nicely? With blowjobs on top?”_

“I shall rephrase in terms you might understand. Go to hell.”

 _“Hey, that’s not like you at all, sweetie! You wouldn’t leave an innocent God's creation in a fix, would you? Or this satan’s spawn I’m carrying. C’mon, Leo, I swear I’ll make it up to you this time. For old times’ sake? I’m gonna serenade you if you don’t let me in. You know I will. I’ve done it before. I’m not joking. I’m doing it right now.”_ The man started singing a dramatic old Finnish schlager. _“Järjen veit / ja minusta orjan teit —”_

Now terrified that someone else would call the police, Leo pressed the button to let him in.

After pre-emptively unbolting the door to the loft, he waited for the sound of the elevator and familiar masculine footsteps approaching, almost physically aware of the dark cloud gathering over his head.

“Not. A good. Time,” he hissed through his teeth as the door opened.

The ruggedly handsome dusky blonde who walked in gave him a broad smile. “Well, we all know it’s easier to find a virgin hole in a whorehouse than reach you when you’re not busy.”

The man lowered a red pet carrier with something living in it on the floor and stood up, just a little shorter than Leo in his customary uniform of leather jacket, cowboy boots and jeans. The look that had once given him the air of Heather Ledger from _Brokeback Mountain_ now just irritated Leo’s fashion sense to no end.

“I know it’s too much to ask, baby —”

“You don’t say?”

“I know, I know, I’m terrible.” The man flashed a bullshit smile that could brighten a theater all the way to the box seats. “You let me in. You’re going to say yes, right?”

“I let you in because you threatened to terrorize the whole street!”

“Aw. I’m not that bad of a singer. What if I beg? On my knees?” A pair of gray eyes slid down Leo’s figure. “With your pants down?”

Leo knew the man hiding in his bedroom couldn’t understand a word, but his ears still burned. “No!”

Olavi glanced at his watch. “I have fifteen minutes. Enough for a quick fuck, right?” He dropped a backpack from his shoulder. “Here’s everything. It should last you for a few days.”

“Hey, now — hold on a minute. You can’t just assume that I’m — dammit, why the hell did I answer..?” Leo muttered to himself.

Olavi shrugged, unphased. “Doesn’t matter. I would just have left her at your downstairs neighbor and tell him to bring her over. You know, the saxophone guy who’s always home. I miss that old codger. I should pay him a visit.”

“Unbelievable.” It wasn’t, though. Leo knew the guy would have done exactly as he said, without feeling the least bit guilty about it.

“So, how about that blowjob?” Olavi looked hopeful. “I didn’t have time to toss one off before I left and I’m feeling pretty horny.”

“You have to be kidding,” Leo hissed, even though he knew very well that the man wasn’t.

Indeed, Olavi had the gall to appear genuinely disappointed. “When did you turn into such a wet blanket?” he muttered.

Leo pinched his nose and controlled himself before he launched into an explication of when and how exactly he’d learned not to say yes to stupid ideas just because he wanted to please others, and what had been Olavi’s particular role in that process of painful personal growth.

The man gave him a thoughtful once-over. Then he glanced toward the kitchen. Too late, Leo remembered the two sets of used dishes on the dinner table.

“ _Jahas_.” A sly smile appeared on Olavi’s mouth. “You really were in the middle of something. Or should I say some _one?_ ”

 _No. No, no._ “He — he’s already left.” Too late again, Leo realized that he should just have claimed that the other set of dishes belonged to Rosa. He suppressed a wince. He really wasn’t at his best, was he?

Olavi didn’t even bother to acknowledge his attempt at a bluff. His gaze darted around the loft as if searching for more clues. “You should introduce us. Who knows what’ll happen?”

“No!”

“No? Oh... caught yourself a breeder, haven’t you? A family man? Someone famous? Can’t be seen with the gay golden boy? I take back what I said about wet blankets. I’m impressed, Leo.”

Leo could feel a massive headache coming on. “If you shut up and leave _right now,_ I will take Kekkonen. All right?”

“Aw, but threesomes are —”

“The offer stands for exactly five seconds. One, two —”

Olavi winked and slunk toward the exit. “Thanks, baby. I mean it. I owe you one.”

 _Oh, on top of the hundred other favors I’ve done you over the years, and getting nothing in return whenever_ I _needed something?_ Leo just glowered at the man he’d once upon a time made the mistake of having a torrid, well-publicized affair with. He had a distinct feeling he’d just been played.

“So long.” Olavi pretended to tip a hat from the door. “See you in June when my gig ends.”

“In Ju— _what?!”_

The door closed after a quickly receding figure.

For about a minute, Leo was unable to do anything but stand still and fume in uncharacteristically homicidal feelings.

_The next time, I’m going to do it. I swear to god. I’m going to kill him._

He considered running after his ex. Possibly strangling him. But in the end, he didn’t even go get his phone and chew Olavi’s head off over a call. What would have been the point? He knew the man wouldn’t change. Most of the time, even a simple apology was too much to hope for from the borderline narcissistic bastard.

Gradually Leo grew aware of a scratching sound at his feet. He glanced down at the pet carrier where the sound was emanating from.

“Another difficult girlfriend?” a muted voice asked in heavily accented English from about a meter behind his back.

Leo started so bad he almost jumped.

 _How long has he been standing there?_ He’d had no idea anyone was moving in the loft.

“A friend,” he choked out. “A bit of an asshole, really. He left his...” He gestured toward the pet carrier.

Ezio came to stand beside him in his sadly loose t-shirt and sweatpants, the expression on his face somewhere between curiosity and suspicion.

“Oh. It is a... cat?”

“Yes.” The headache kept looming right behind Leo’s brows.

The carrier rattled and a low growling could be heard from within.

“Are you going to let that thing out?” Ezio asked dubiously.

The growl turned into a displeased huff.

“I suppose I must. Perhaps it were better if you stepped back a few meters.”

“Why? You think I can’t handle a little pussy?”

 _No, based on all that Rosa has told, I have no doubt you can._ “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Leo leaned down to unhook the carrier’s wire door, stood up and stepped back quickly.

At first, nothing happened.

Then long whiskers appeared. Followed by a pair of hooded green eyes. Slowly, a great, fluffy, red feline with a long bushy tail emerged from the carrier. It stretched and yawned, showcasing sharp claws and teeth, and gazed around with the unimpressed air of a monarch observing a particularly backward colony. Then it planted its butt on the hardwood floor and started cleaning its front paws.

“He has a name?” Ezio whispered.

“She,” Leo muttered. “She’s a girl. Her name is Kekkonen.”

Ezio’s brows pulled together. “Kekk— _che?”_

“A Finnish president who reigned for twenty-five years during the Cold War. Known for his sense of self-worth.”

“Why does your friend’s cat have a man’s name?”

Leo rubbed at a spot between his brows. “Red cats are most often male and she’s very fluffy. So my” — _idiot of an ex_ — “friend thought she was a boy. When I told him otherwise, he decided to keep the name. He thought it fit.”

“I see.” Ezio looked at the creature. “Very nice of you to take care of your friend’s cat.”

 _What can I say. I’m a sucker for charming scumbags._ “I’m sorry you had to listen to us quarrel.”

“You had a quarrel?”

Leo realized that to an Italian, his row with Olavi had probably sounded like a jovial meeting between two buddies.

Kekkonen lowered the paw she’d been licking and and fixed her hooded eyes on Ezio.

“She’s sighting me,” Ezio whispered. “What should I do?”

“I recommend against sudden movements.”

Ezio stood stock still. So still that it had to be something he’d been taught to do in an assassin school. The cat started sinuously closer, now intent on his presence.

 _Oh crap. She’s going to throw a tantrum._ Leo had seen it happen before. Years ago, he’d spent quite a lot of time cohabiting with Olavi’s cat. At first, she’d treated him with complete indifference, a state of affairs which had over time developed into cautious acceptance. Still, Olavi was the only person who could actually handle the beast and not expect to be torn to bloody shreds. Somewhere in Leo’s own forearms, faded scars still reminded of the day when he’d ascertained his suspicions about the cat’s gender.

Kekkonen stopped right in front of Ezio, looked up at him, and started purring.

“Leonardo?” Ezio hissed. “What does this mean?”

“I’m not certain. Best to remain still.” The cat had exhibited idiosyncratic behavior before, seemingly relaxed about someone or something, signaling her displeasure only with the tiniest switch of her tail before all hell broke loose.

Still purring, Kekkonen started rubbing up against Ezio’s ankles.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Ezio said, “but these do not seem like signs of hostility.”

“How... bizarre.” Leo watched in astonishment as the cat marked the Italian as her personal property. “I’ve never seen her — wait, what are you —”

In horror, he watched as Ezio slowly lowered himself to one knee and placed his hand on the cat’s head.

Against all expectations, sharp claws did not embed themselves in said appendage. Instead, Kekkonen purred even louder and rubbed the sides of her forehead against Ezio’s hand, eyes closing in bliss.

 _“Non sei malaccio, eh?”_ Ezio snorted softly. _“Il dottore sta dicendo cavolate.”_

“This is most peculiar,” Leo muttered. “I’ve never seen her behave like this before.”

“Never?”

“No.” Leo scratched his temple. “Then again, she _is_ a female. I get the impression that they are predisposed to like you.”

Ezio looked up and grinned.

Suddenly Leo was almost willing to forgive his ex.

It was a tired little grin, just a ghost of Ezio’s smiles that first day really. But it was his first genuine smile since Cristina’s visit, and no matter how weary, it made Leo’s heart beat faster.

If only. If only they’d lived in a fantasyland where he was not a total wimp and orientation did not matter. He could have knelt and kissed that beautiful, scarred mouth right now. He could almost sense how it would feel. Warm and rough from the stubble, and so strong it practically vibrated against him —

“By the way,” Ezio said. “You said something about a meeting?”

_“Voi helvetti!”_

Leo shot toward his room, pausing only to grab his phone on the way in order to call a taxi.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [President Kekkonen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urho_Kekkonen) is a big figure in Finnish pop culture. Here he is all prettified in a 1980 postage stamp:
> 
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> His most famous quote is "saatanan tunarit", approximate translation of which is "you fucking bunglers".


End file.
